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Thunderstorm MicroBurst

Weasel

Well Known Member
Awesome shot by this photographer!

MicroBurst

The body says: DO NOT BROADCAST!
Any re-use of this video is strictly prohibited without proper licensing.

I am assuming by providing a link to the original post that I am not violating any copyright laws. Correct me if I am wrong.

Very educational!!!!
 
Quite common

We see those quite often in AZ. We had one a couple of weeks ago that damaged about 30 planes and several buildings at the Chandler airport. KCHD. I live approximately 5 miles away at Stellar airpark and we only had moderate winds. I have seen these from the air and they are amazing to see. A 10 mile distance is mandatory.
 
Unfortunately, I got to watch my old 172's wingtip get smashed into the pavement as it was parked on the Shreveport ramp on a beautiful, calm, 0% precip. day. No planes were tied down, but mine was the only one that got tipped up.... Anyway, my advice is to always tie down. Who cares if it's calm out. You never know when you'll otherwise have to hitch a flight home :eek:...
 
We see those quite often in AZ. We had one a couple of weeks ago that damaged about 30 planes and several buildings at the Chandler airport. KCHD. I live approximately 5 miles away at Stellar airpark and we only had moderate winds. I have seen these from the air and they are amazing to see. A 10 mile distance is mandatory.

If you know the Tucson area, that video was taken from "A Mountain" looking north - a local reporting point TUS tower always checks that you are familiar with.

Heading to 'a mountain' as an ATC command is a bit confusing in S. Arizona for visitors. :)

If you stop the video at about the 00:05 mark, you can see where we live at the base of the small mountain range about 2/3 across the screen. We got no rain from that storm and we are 13 nm from the video shooting location.
 
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Bah! We caught a tail of something this hostile in NM last week. Were running like crazy from it. Shoot! Strapped to the seats couldn't breathe my copilot is still asking me what it was. Sending him this link :)
 
Unfortunately, I got to watch my old 172's wingtip get smashed into the pavement as it was parked on the Shreveport ramp on a beautiful, calm, 0% precip. day. No planes were tied down, but mine was the only one that got tipped up.... Anyway, my advice is to always tie down. Who cares if it's calm out. You never know when you'll otherwise have to hitch a flight home :eek:...

Yes tie down all of the time, and if the plane next to you isn't tied down... move to another space. :)
 
It happened to me while my previous plane was tied down. Ripped it from the ropes and flipped it over on its back. The T-6 I was parked next to got tossed around pretty good as well. As sad as it was, I was thankful my plane didn't get tossed into the T-6.
 
Gil... I never thought about how that sounds on the radio coming out of Tucson. Head for a mountain....
Back to the video. It should be included in aviation weather 101.
The power and path is not easily visualized in a classroom by description only.
Last season I parked at San Diego Montgomery. Late afternoon, I decided to move over to Gillespie Field for the night. In the morning, I sadly watched the news and pics of the RV that was tied next to me back at Montgomery. It was now over the fence and on top of two Prius cars. Not sure why I felt guilty... having moved just in time.
 
I witnessed what I presume was a dry microburst out my office window yesterday. I'd been watching heavy rainfall gradually move in from the north for about half an hour. At one point, I looked out my window and I was shocked to see an enormous dust cloud surrounding a building about half a mile to the NE. And by "enormous," I mean "mostly obscuring a 17-story building."

As I sat there staring in wonder and trying to make sense of what I was seeing, I started to see treetops sway back and forth. I watched in amazement as this swaying motion propagated from the vicinity of the dust cloud to my office.

I so wish I had video of it; it was one of the more amazing things I've witnessed in my entire life, and I had a great vantage point.
 
I witnessed what I presume was a dry microburst out my office window yesterday. I'd been watching heavy rainfall gradually move in from the north for about half an hour. At one point, I looked out my window and I was shocked to see an enormous dust cloud surrounding a building about half a mile to the NE. And by "enormous," I mean "mostly obscuring a 17-story building."

As I sat there staring in wonder and trying to make sense of what I was seeing, I started to see treetops sway back and forth. I watched in amazement as this swaying motion propagated from the vicinity of the dust cloud to my office.

I so wish I had video of it; it was one of the more amazing things I've witnessed in my entire life, and I had a great vantage point.

Sounds like a Haboob -

During thunderstorm formation, winds move in a direction opposite to the storm's travel, and they move from all directions into the thunderstorm. When the storm collapses and begins to release precipitation, wind directions reverse, gusting outward from the storm and generally gusting the strongest in the direction of the storm's travel.

Above from wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haboob

In Arizona and the Mojave Desert they seem to form from an isolated thunderstorm
 
Meteorologist Ari Sarsalari's Explanation

If you go to the Facebook page of "Meteorologist Ari Sarsalari" you will get a very interesting explanation of this very same microburst (the one shown in the video of Post 1 of this thread). Ari used to be in Huntsville on the local ABC affiliate and now has moved on to do special things at The Weather Channel.

I found him to be one of the most interesting Meteo.. Meter...oh shoot, Weathermen we've had in Huntsvile in a long time. :D

The lady also mentions "haboobs" just before the end of the segment.

P.S. The Weather Channel video does give credit to the original photographer.
 
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I have lived in the TS capital for over forty years and I have never seen such a great example of a TS development. Very nice video for education.
 
The lady also mentions "haboobs" just before the end of the segment....

Yeah, that confused me. It seems like I'd heard several people refer to either the microburst, or the T-storm that spawned it as a "haboob". But, I looked it up. There actually was a huge dust cloud (haboob) pushed out ahead of the front associated with that storm.
 
Looks like the clouds dumped a bucket of water. No surviving a direct hit!

The highest County rain gauge measurement in that area recorded about 0.84 inches of rain, and it all fell in a span of less than 30 minutes. The recording is in 15 minute increments.

For the locals, it was at the Rillito River and La Cholla Blvd.

Fairly normal for a large monsoon storm. They can be much bigger though, we got almost 4 inches in one hour a couple of years ago in Oro valley.
 
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I have lived in the TS capital for over forty years and I have never seen such a great example of a TS development. Very nice video for education.

Sometimes we Tucson folks say we are the thunderstorm capital. :)

The folks who do the lightning strike locations you see on the weather maps have the detection operation in Tucson, and have one of their lightning detectors on our Airpark.

http://www.vaisala.com/en/weather/lightning/Pages/default.aspx

It's an interesting unit, it uses GPS time to record pulses on a radio and sends the data up to a satellite. A ground station takes these pulse times and triangulates to get a lightning strike location in near real-time.
 
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