Thursday, April 5

This afternoon, I was minding my business and packing to go to Huntsville for a long, relaxing weekend. I was riding with my friend, Trent, who picked me up on his way through Birmingham from Tuscaloosa. He called me when he got to school and rushed me outside, I had no idea what was going on but I did as he asked. As soon as I stepped outside my dorm, I knew something was up the air pressure was strange, it was incredibly cloudy, and it was beginning to sprinkle (none of this had been present just an hour or so previously when I went into my dorm). As soon as I got my stuff in the car and we began to drive, the bottom fell out and the rain POURED around us. As we pulled off campus, I noticed one of the strangest cloud formations I had ever seen.

Trent says that he noticed this when leaving Tuscaloosa. He called it a wall cloud: a HUGE, DARK cloud that just suddenly ends leaving the sun shining through. Here is another view of the cloud.

Notice how the cloud just ends and the sun brightly shines through on the other side! This fascinated me! I've always wondered how far you had to drive before the rain would just stop or if the weather would gradually  become less and less fierce until you reached the end of the storm and it stopped. In this case, it would suddenly end when you reached the end of the cloud! Unfortunately, the end of the cloud was in the opposite direction that we were driving, so Trent and I decided to stop for dinner and wait out the rain. Thanks to our snazzy iPhone weather and radar apps, we knew that if we waited about half an hour, the rain would be either much lighter or gone entirely.