Hail To Spring, hail storm on the last day of May, 2008, Minneapolis, Minnesota, photo © 2008 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
rising heat currents
confusing mixed messages
5 in the bathtub
weather radio
candles, pillows, and matches
Kiev runs away
hail rips off shingles
angry green kicks and sputters
two-faced blue Sunday
-posted on red Ravine, Thursday, June 5th, 2008
-related to post, haiku (one-a-day)
confusing mixed messages — that’s so true.
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yeah–good ones
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QM, impressive photos & haiku. I was concerned about you & Liz & the storms. Has Kiev come back? We were at camp until yesterday morning. They were calling for a tornado here & we didn’t want to to be there, but intend on going back tomorrow. Hope all is well with you. The weather has been crazy thus far. D
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QM: good photo and powerful haiku trilogy. Your spring looks and sounds a lot like ours in Wyoming. On May 22 and May 23, I wrote:
dark clouds rolling north
killer tornados follow:
sirens wail a warning
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scared of tornados
Shelley phones from hospital:
“please, help my babies!”
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The tornado season has been killer this spring. Even here, the winds are persisting way past their normal time, with great intensity.
QM, I love the white hail against the white clapboard. I had to adjust my eyes when first seeing the photo. It was only as my eyes moved down that I realized all that white wasn’t hail.
BTW, when we get hail here, the clouds turn a dark that I imagine to be similar to what breathepeace describes in her haiku. I love the color, and the knowing that real precipitation is in those clouds (versus the ones that promise something but don’t deliver), yet they also scare me. The damage, should they turn truly ugly, is so huge.
p.s.,two-faced blue Sunday — what a great phrase!
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What a shot of all that green and white destruction. Such big balls! My daughter in Omaha said the tornado that wiped out half of Parkersville Iowa passed over her – like a black shelf that darkened the sun and made the day night. It picked up their brand new BBQ grill and flung it 10 feet onto a concrete patio and smashed it! Still works but looks really bad. We’ve had some wild weather lately, including a slushy ice-storm not long ago after a 95 degree day. There was such a late freeze this May, the apple trees are taking a year off. They deserve it.
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interesting.
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Thanks everyone. It’s been a totally crazy spring here. We’ve been lucky so far where we live — only a few shingles have blown off the roof. That was last weekend. It was completely blue, hot, and sunny. We heard the sirens and thought – they’ve got to be kidding.
Within 15 minutes, hail was pounding against the glass in the windows, I mean it was falling so hard. We keep a little emergency kit of supplies around: radio, matches, candles, flashlights, a blankets, and pillows. We thought we were prepared. But when it came to actually making it happen, we were pretty slow!
The cats always feel it coming and wanted to run from us. Liz put Kiev in the bathroom, closed the door, then grabbed Chaco and Pants, opened the door to the bathroom again, and Kiev ran out and hid in the closet. We left her out in the bedroom and Liz was in the tub with the two cats, I sat on the toilet, watching out the window. It was crazy!
chickenlil, that Iowa tornado was something. We had one over Memorial Day that wiped out a little subdivision in Hugo. Houses right down to the foundation. Glad it missed your daughter!
breathepeace, I didn’t know Wyoming got tornados. Wow, that’s wild.
lissa and scot and sumedh, thanks!
ybonesy, yeah, that one big ball of hail in the center under the chair was one of the biggest we got that day. But you should have seen the footage of other places — it looked like it had snowed balls of ice.
diddy, Mom told me you guys had come home from the cabin due to tornado warnings. Hope it all worked out okay! Did I miss your birthday! Happy belated! Hopefully, I’ll get to visit the cabin a little with you in July.
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BTW, today there are wind advisories today, gusting up to 30, 40, and 50mph out here. Two chairs have blown over on the deck and the oak branches are really bending. No precip yet.
Last night when I got home from the poetry group, we turned on the news, and WCCO’s Good Question was about green skies and tornados.
I’m adding the link if you want to read the whole thing. But below is what stuck out for me:
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WCCO Good Question by Jason DeRusha, Your Tornado Questions Answered, June 5th, 2008 (LINK)
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Why does the sky turn green before a tornado?
It doesn’t always turn green, and it doesn’t always mean a tornado is coming. But scientists believe there’s a mixing of two colors. The sun typically gives off a yellow glow, and storm clouds are typically deeper than normal clouds, and full of water droplets. Water droplets typically appear blue. When the yellow of the sun shines through the blue of the water droplets, the sky turns green.
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Why do tornadoes usually hit outlying suburbs like Anoka and not in Minneapolis?
Probability. Downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul aren’t much larger than a couple square miles. The odds of a tornado hitting those tiny targets is by one estimate, 1 in 1000 years. Tornado alley, in the Midwest, has only about a dozen major cities. The rest of the land is rural. Tornados have come close to Minneapolis. Two hit Fridley in 1965 just five miles from downtown.
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Why do storms seem to target the North Metro area of Minneapolis and St. Paul?
(Check out the Good Question link above for the full explanation. And this link is full of great info on other cities across the U.S. — City-data.com (LINK)
The I-90 corridor in southwestern Minnesota is way above the national average for tornados. Albert Lea is 88 percent above the average.
The north Metro is in the 30 to 40 percent range above the national average. Brooklyn Park is 35 percent above average and Anoka is 31 percent above average.
The southern Metro has had more tornadoes than the north, according to City-Data.com. Apple Valley is 46 percent higher than the average and Lakeville is 48 percent higher.
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