Friday, August 21, 2015

What's North Of Kitt Peak - My Hypothesis

I used jack Hales web cam page - http://www.camviewing.com/mosaic/ - to build a loop of the image-to-image webcam photos from Kitt Peak and then snipped 5 photos at 1-minute intervals. The refresh/update rate of the cam is long at 1-minute, so a detailed loop is not possible. The images are below, each with the time of image at its lower left corner.

 4:41 pm
 4:42 pm
 4:43 pm
 4:44 pm
4:45 pm

The large storm that is off to the right (see the radar image shown in the first post) produced a strong gust front that was moving from right-to-left during this sequence and blowing dust along the gust front can be seen in the distance over the flat roof to right of telescopes in the bottom two images.

My hypothesis (guess) is that gust front briefly interacted (brief because it was moving westward at probably 50 to 60 mph) with a new updraft (right center to center of the images) and a very short-lived tornado formed that was essentially a hybrid gustnado/land spout. This is just a guess, but it seems to fit with the westward distortion at 4:43 pm of what appears to be the funnel cloud.

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