Tis The Season Of Spring Weather Porn Storms. VERY Dramatic Images

From @MattHinesTX via Twitter, a dramatic
view of the spinning supercell thunderstorm
in Texas that produced several tornadoes.  

The nation's severe weather season is in full swing, though fortunately it is so far not as intense as it is in many years.

Still, there has been some drama. Even the quietest years have some drama.

On Sunday, severe thunderstorms broke in Texas.

One supercell storm in particular created some startling images as it marched kind of slowly eastward through north central Texas from near Abilene to a little southwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

A posse of storm chasers remained closely attached to the supercell as it repeatedly dropped tornadoes across the Texas prairie.

They got some great photos and videos of the storm.

Almost all of the 19 reports of tornadoes in the nation Sunday came from this supercell thunderstorm, though I'm sure some of these are duplicate reports.

Luckily, no individual tornado lasted too long with this supercell, and the twisters hit rural areas. That meant there wasn't all that much damage, which was a good thing.

A beautiful image of a giant supercell thunderstorm
that produced tornadoes in Texas Sunday
Photo from Kelly DeLay via Twitter.  

For part of its life, the supercell storm had one of the best cloud structures I've ever seen, and certainly the best and most dramatic I've seen this year so far.

The mesocyclone - that's the real spinning part of the storm that would produce tornadoes - produced a large rotating, black column rising high into the air.

The curved, spiral bands of this mesocyclone looked like something out of one of those bad alien invasion movies.

It's no surprise that this kind of storm structure is often referred to as a mothership.

As you can see, I've posted some photos of this beast taken by storm chasers.

It's too bad supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes cause so much damage, death and heartache. If not for that, they would be truly beautiful things, some of the most awe inspiring examples of nature at work.

From StormChasingVideo.com, we get this footage of the Texas supercell, complete with day and nighttime views of some of the tornadoes it spit out, giant hail cracking the video taker's windshield, a hailstone that measures four inches across - almost grapefruit size! - and lots of lightning:


Other severe storms broke over the weekend elsewhere.

Here's a wild video of straight line winds Saturday in Dothan, Alabama. Whoever installed the homeowner's fence did a good job. I would have thought the winds would have flattened it.



Near Jacksonville, Florida, some people driving down a busy suburban boulevard suddenly encountered a tornado.

The thunderstorm that caused the tornado pretty much had a tornado warning with it almost all the way across northern Florida as it moved west to east. The Jacksonville touchdown, and any others that might have occured, were relatively brief.

Still, pretty scary: