SERENDIPITOUS VOYAGES: NATURE'S LOUD REPRIMANDS

Saturday, April 14, 2012

NATURE'S LOUD REPRIMANDS

NATURE’S LOUD REPRIMANDS

Yesterday it has arrived. The phenomenon, I heard a lot but was waiting to see for long since my landing in the middle of this forest area in 2010. And when it came at last in all its majesty, it's devastated my camp area in just fifteen minutes. All was calm yesterday, 13^th April 2012, till 3 o’ clock in the afternoon. It was warm and fairly humid outside. A pale breeze was the first to come by. Suddenly I could hear the roaring of the wind from a distance. Dark clouds started to gather quickly across the mountain. Then a feeble rain came as a trailer. And....suddenly like a boisterous laugh of a poltergeist it came and crumbled on mother earth with a force par comparison. Its wrathful growl sends shudders down the spine. The awesome power it carried along brought the trees down in a heap. The doors and windows battered vehemently against the wall and bended at last as if surrendered to its rage. Blistering thick lightning embellished the sky like an angry stroke of a frantic painter. Super cooled ice crystals showered from sky like white gems. Stray dogs ran helter- skeltor as they couldn’t realize from where the stones, they scared of, were coming in abundance.

Fairly a summer season phenomenon, thunderstorms comes with strong winds, hailstones, powerful lightning, and heavy rain. This normally lasts for around thirty minutes in an area of approximately fifteen miles in diameter. It’s fairly easy to predict a thunderstorm as it shows all symptoms of a rain like dark clouds, wind and lightning. Gradually the winds would turn furious and the lightning, dangerous. And then, the rain followed by flash flood. Comes in three stages of ten minutes duration, the second stage of heavy rain and strong winds is much more dangerous because of falling trees and powerful lightning. It normally dissipates after approximately thirty minutes when the rainfall starts to die off. Once it’s over, you may just stroll around to see the devastations. Structural damage to properties, vehicles, fallen trees, destruction of power lines, dead livestock’s and of course even human injury or death.

This is one shot I've taken from the safety of my room. I've posted few more videos in "My You-Tube Videos" for you to see with all it's link at the end.
My amateurish camera work may please be forgiven.

THE FURY..........

{Thunderstorms begin when a parcel of warm, moist air begins to rise. As the air expands and cools, the water vapour within it condenses and forms a cloud. If there is sufficient atmospheric instability, the heat released by condensation will keep the air inside the cloud warmer than the air surrounding it, enabling it to grow larger and higher. The power of the rising air, or updraft, keeps millions of water droplets in suspension until they become so heavy they fall as rain.

Above the freezing line (typically 12,000 to 15,000 m above the ground in summer), the droplets form supercooled ice crystals that can grow into hailstones. When the thundercloud reaches the cumulonimbus stage and hits the tropopause (where temperature stops decreasing with height, around 12,000 m in summer), the jet stream tugs the cloud into its famous “anvil” shape, and the rising air in the cloud falls back to earth in cool, dry currents of air surrounding the warm, moist core of the storm. These downdrafts can pool at the bottom of the thunderstorm and create microbursts — brief, violent gusts of wind and rain. When the static buildup between the clashing air masses in a thunderstorm (the downdrafts carry a positive charge; the updrafts a negative one) triggers an electrical discharge, lightning forks through the sky at 145,000 km/s. The lightning heats the surrounding air, which expands at supersonic speeds, creating the mighty crashes we recognize as thunder. (courtesy, Canadian atlas/ geographic online).}

And the devastation....