Finger on the Weather

You may have seen this photograph floating around the Internet over the past week; a friend of mine e-mailed it to me, and the accompanying text claimed it was the tornado that struck the Boy Scout camp in Iowa.

I was immediately suspicious, you’ll notice the trees and other vegetation in the photograph are standing straight up as if there wasn’t a whisper of breeze.

Jeff Hutton, warning coordination meteorologist for the Dodge City office of the National Weather Service, calls the formation “a very spectacular supercell thunderstorm with a tremendous collar cloud.”

But it’s no tornado.