The skies aren’t so scary when the ground is parched

This is not the sky picture I wanted to show you. Well, I guess it is because I am showing it. I cannot remember where this was taken. Okay, jerk, yes, I know it was taken from an aircraft. Jeez. Leave me alone, will ya?

The truth is I took a couple of shots with my telephone from my office building of the scary-looking/not scary-looking skies this afternoon. Unfortunately, the shot was kind of blurred. I should have bracketed the photo. I had plenty of time. I wasn’t wasting film because I … film, you know, photographic material consisting of a base of celluloid covered with a photographic emulsion; used to make negatives or transparencies.

What sky I was photographing this afternoon was a mass of dark clouds hanging above a clearer horizon. I am not a meteorologist so I don’t know if it was a “wall cloud” of the kind you hear of or see in conjunction with a tornado or severe thunderstorm.

I don’t think our storm this afternoon was severe. The general conditions for a severe thunderstorm, according to NOAA:

“(A) thunderstorm that produces a tornado, winds of at least 58 mph (50 knots), and/or hail at least ¾” in diameter. Structural wind damage may imply the occurrence of a severe thunderstorm. A thunderstorm wind equal to or greater than 40 mph (35 knots) and/or hail of at least ½” is defined as approaching severe.”

Glad I could help. But no doubt it was a thunderstorm because I saw lightning and heard thunder and it rained like a cow pissing on a flat rock. Hell of a visual but that’s what I grew up hearing in East Texas. That and “gully washer” and “frog strangler.” It was raining very abundantly, is what I am saying. And that, my friends, is a good thing because as it is written, we are in the middle of a drought right here in River City, with a capital “d” that rhymes with “p” and that stands for “parchedness.” Which, my friends, means dry. I love “(Ya Got) Trouble” from “The Music Man,” if you hadn’t noticed.

Folks really are having trouble in river cities, such as Minot, N.D., where the Souris River is on a rampage and threatening the city. Worse yet, a rising Missouri River is causing Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorities to keep an eye on two nuclear power plants in Nebraska. Water, water everywhere … Or so it seems.

As I said, we here on the Upper Texas Coast are bone dry. The rains we had today and yesterday, particularly today, were nice. That’s why the threatening sky I wasn’t able to get a good shot of wasn’t all that threatening. Yes, it rained, and rained and rained some more. But it hardly made a noticeable dent in the rainfall deficit which now, thanks to the rain the last couple of days, is just less than 20 inches.

Such extreme lack of rainfall and our geographic proximity to the Gulf of Mexico gets a lot of people, myself included, talking foolish, saying things like: “We need a tropical storm to park off the coast for a week.” Of course, tropical storms have a nasty habit of not minding what we mortals try to tell nature. To paraphrase a great Jimmy Buffet song, there is no trying to reason with hurricane season. But the type of rain a tropical gully washer brings is about what we need.