Jason Persoff
EF3
Bill Hark and I witnessed tandem vortices today that were fairly spectacular and appear to have caused less than F0 damage. Because...they were dust devils. But they were beautiful specimens in fact: each easily extended over 1000 ft in the air as huge (but thin) rotating columns. They were--in both of our opinions--the tallest and best-developed dust devils either of us have ever witnessed and were totally unexpected.
They formed off of Hwy 81 in Polk Cty just north of Stromsburg around 3pm (roughly, I'll have to look at the video time stamp). They were long-lived, though, sadly, not long-enough lived to allow me to take stills. I will try to edit the vidcaps tonight and post 'em here. As with tornadoes, these vortices continued to exist even though their debris cloud at the sfc dissipated: faint higher level dust continued to show their existence as they passed over much greener terrain.
A veritable outbreak of dust devils continued, but none as spectacular as those two. So cool were these that Bill's video is to appear on the Weather Channel tonight. Very cool anomoly in what otherwise was at best a travel day .
This attachment was MARKEDLY altered in order to highlight the structure of the dust devil. With everything maxed (particularly contrast), you can get an idea of the height of the column. Ironically, maxing everything out also had the added benefit of making it look a bit like a tornado, but this is a video grab of the dust devil).
[attachmentid=338]
They formed off of Hwy 81 in Polk Cty just north of Stromsburg around 3pm (roughly, I'll have to look at the video time stamp). They were long-lived, though, sadly, not long-enough lived to allow me to take stills. I will try to edit the vidcaps tonight and post 'em here. As with tornadoes, these vortices continued to exist even though their debris cloud at the sfc dissipated: faint higher level dust continued to show their existence as they passed over much greener terrain.
A veritable outbreak of dust devils continued, but none as spectacular as those two. So cool were these that Bill's video is to appear on the Weather Channel tonight. Very cool anomoly in what otherwise was at best a travel day .
This attachment was MARKEDLY altered in order to highlight the structure of the dust devil. With everything maxed (particularly contrast), you can get an idea of the height of the column. Ironically, maxing everything out also had the added benefit of making it look a bit like a tornado, but this is a video grab of the dust devil).
[attachmentid=338]