The Stormy Passage from Scottsboro to Huntsville

BLOT: (27 Oct 2010 - 12:43:02 PM)

The Stormy Passage from Scottsboro to Huntsville

As most of my local friends know (and some not local but still in the area o' storms): there were lots of tornado warnings issued yesterday, but luckily not much damage. Around the start of the festivities, say about 2pm, Sarah and I were leaving Scottsboro and heading home. As we got done finishing off a rapid lunch at the Dairy Queen at the edge of the town limits, the sirens started. A few of the people there started speculating about where it [the storm, not the sirens] was coming from and I had to chuckle because the weather out behind them, to the east, was black and forboding. The weather in front of them, to the west (towards Huntsville) was cloudy and windy but sort of bright. I guess the actual tornadoes were to the south-west and coming up, but it still strikes me as weird that it wouldn't occur to them to look towards the storm.

Anyhow, the drive from there to Fontainbleu Terrace wasn't super eventful, but there was much weather involved. We would have blue sky, and then dark sky, and then heavy rain, followed by no rain. Wind, which pushed the Volvo around so I hate to think how it was impacting the 18-wheelers, was about the only constant. I snapped about 40 or 50 picks, and then edited it down to the half that were decent to look at. Notice how somewhere in the middle, we have heavy enough rain to soak stuff going on, but there are lots of blue sky patches overhead. Oh, and there was some interesting depth theory experiments going on with the clouds: clouds way low down with high clouds above them and, in one case, a giant pyramid in the clouds that never reached blue sky but was some weird cone punched out of them.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all was when we got home, there was this eerie silence. No birds or animals. All the kids were inside. You could hear an electrical hum in the distance, and some cars on University, but that was about it.

TAGS: Huntsville Weather

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 43
BY MONTH: October 2010