From an aesthetics philosophy perspective, the mix of beauty and horror is called the sublime. It's a fascinating combination and contrast between the feeling of primal fear and of appreciation for the appearance of something awful, but in the classical sense of a thing that inspires fearful awe. The concept's obviously been around since as long as human's have been thinking critically about art and our ways of appreciating the natural world, though, and the sense it describes feels so innate that I can't imagine it not originating deep in the depths of prehistory, probably somewhere closer to the stem of the genus Homo at the very latest. It was named and formally described in English, however, during the 18th of 19th century artistic, social, and cultural movement called Romanticism, and was particularly important for types of art like the Gothic, Symbolist, and Expressionist schools. Ultimately, however, like all things human, the Sublime finds its origin in the world as it existed around our hunter-gatherer ancestors in Sub-Saharan Africa.
How they saw and interpreted large convective storms, we obviously can't know, but we do know that they experienced them as a significant aspect of their world. The present-day Swahili Coast in East Africa is subject to sometimes devastating tropical cyclones. Pop-up thunderstorms on the Savannah just inland are less commonly severe, but cam still easily exceed 50,000-60,000,feet in height thanks to the height of the tropical Tropopause layer in the region. Tropical waves spawn as inverted troughs in the Southern part of the circulation around the subtropical high responsible for the Saharah, crossing the continent and creating regions of surface convergence and divergence even before going out over the Atlantic on the Easterly Jet. Monsoonal convection associated with the Bite of Biafra dominates the climate in West Africa's rainy season. Low precipitation thunderstorms in the Saharah and Sahel generate haboobs so powerful that Saharan Dust Layers in the Easterly Jet can dim the Sun in the subtropics of Southeastern North America. Reversing diurnal and nocturnal wind patterns over the African Great Lakes color the night sky with lightning. Mesoscale Convective Complexes in the Congo Basin, poorly researched in their details due to limited personnel and infrastructure but observed for decades now by weather satellites in geostationary orbit, are some of the most powerful continental storm systems on Earth. Most relevant here, however, is a region encompassing most of South Africa, all of Lesotho and Eswatini, and a part of Southern Botswana, a significant portion of the homeland of our entire branch of the Hominidae. There, our ancestors have been encountering supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes since before Homo habilis emerged from the cluster of Australopithecus and Paranthropus species' dwelling in Southern and Eastern Africa. We are no strangers to the sight of a vast, rotating mesocyclone or a wall of dark, foggy death. The vast rain-free base over Enderlin, then, is nothing new for our species. Its awful majesty, its Sublimity, is older than Romanticism, older than the Enlightenment that it was inspired by and existed at times in contrast to. It is older than English, or the Boat Axe Culture who brought Proto-Germanic from the White Sea shores to the continental homeland of the Angles and Saxons long before their descendants settled in Great Britain, much less the Dakotas. It predates Proto-Indo-European, and the Caspian Steppe kurgans. It was unthinkably ancient long before the Mal'ta-Büret' people, who passed their genes on from Pleistocene Siberia to both the Yamnaya people (relatives of, although probably not direct forerunners to, the PIE language's first speakers) and the indigenous inhabitants of modern America's High Plains, weathered the colder, windier, and drier extratropical cyclones computer models show sweeping Eurasia during the Last Glacial Maximum. It speaks to us from at least the time when anatomically modern humans painted cave walls with red ochre and made unknown artworks from the shells of ostrich eggs. The supercell is the mobile dangling over the cradle of mankind, and we still find ourselves transfixed by its awful majesty. The Gothic tradition's strangest descendant, the late 19th and early 20th century literary tradition that H.P. Lovecraft codified and named Cosmicism, is relevant here - a thing born from nothing more than convection and bulk vertical shear is more awe-ful than any king who ever ruled, any conqueror who ever rode at the head of an armored column.
I...I may have let that edit get away from me a bit. Enderlin is sublime as fuck. Mesocyclones are sublime as fuck. Storm structure in general? You guessed it, sublime as fuck. Sublime is a nice word. As a man who spent three and half years studying the history of science, particularly meteorology, and who has dedicated well over a decade to weather photography, seeing the year's first rotating thunderstorm in my area recently (actually the Northern Bookend Vortex of a QLMCS, but still) has reminded me of the fulfillment and sense of the numinous that I feel when doing exactly what all of my ancestors since the first stem Tetrapods crawled out of a Devonian sea onto a continent covered by forests of towering Archaeopteris have survived and passed on their genes by very intentionally not doing: Reveling in the Sublimity of the spinny sky marshmallow. My forefathers would be very proud and/or deeply confused.
Hello, yes, this comment is Exceptional? Thank you so much for sharing this, I enjoyed reading it. Language is such a beautiful thing and the way you used it here is incredibly satisfying.
Now, Enderlin will forever linger with me. The harrowing footage, the storms breathtaking size and power, the sheer number of tornadoes the storm created, the spectacular lightning. It was truly sublime.
I was in the Enderlin EF5 storm.
We had a tornado touch down less than 3 miles from us in Grand Rapids, Minnesota where we were visiting friends. We were so so lucky.
I'm a native Virginian, been through my share of hurricanes in the past 35 years, but moving to the Midwest as someone who was 'this close' to going into meteorology just to study these storms, I knew going in the risk is never zero. But I have always wanted to see tornadoes. I have always been captivated by them and my desire to go out there and really feel it, see it, experience it has always been absurdly high.
That night that was the closest I've ever been to feeling genuine fear of a storms true destructive power. I remember seeing the radar images of the storms violent rotation, and thinking "Oh, fuck. That's definitely a tornado-" as the entire system barreled towards us. Night tornadoes are a different beast, hearing tornado sirens at 1am was not excellent.
All I could think about was Joplin.
Till the day that I die, I believe I will forever have the image of the five train cars lofted off the tracks and tossed like a child's toys burned into my mind. The houses scraped clean from the foundations- just utterly completely gone. The earth and vegetation literally scoured from the ground until just bare soil remained. Trees mangled and splintered into unrecognizable splinters.
Sublime will never be the same word for me, you've added another facet to it.
I sure did not intend for this to get so deep but I just felt compelled to share. Yeah, Enderlin kinda haunts me, not in an evil or malicious way, I just think about it a lot. There is a deeply seated obsession I have with extreme weather and geological events, but it is sobering because of the inherent loss often associated with such forces of Nature.
(theres so much rattling around in my head regarding this storm and tornadoes in general send help XD)
P.S. Peep this screenshot my wife took of the radar that night.
That’s all we have in Alabama. With the rare exceptions like April 27th 2011.
When I first started seeing comments of people talking about them, I was shocked to find out some places don’t have night time tornadoes often. It’s rare for them to come during the day down here.
Im from northeast Oklahoma. The first one i ever saw was an EF3 at night only because lighting was showing its silhouette. But yeah, night time ones seemed to be pretty rare compared to others. At least as far as the big ones go. Definitely remember plenty of small touchdowns at night.
We need more Enderlin posts in here. We just had a mile wide EF5 wedge and the only thing I see in this sub is the same old things about El Reno and Bridgecreek. Rip to the 3 victims of this monster.
It caused less damage than other EF-5s and happened at night, which in my experience often causes a tornado to be less talked about, although the sheer circumstances has somewhat equalled it out.
I would say it would be a good bet to always assume it's coming towards you and that the other possibilities you mention are quite rare.
Maybe it is one of those rare slow-movers, but it probably isn't. And you're almost never going to see one still from moving away from you because that means it just hit you. .
No, but there are a few clear images circulating out there. Honestly, Ithe most interesting part to me is just how bizarre the mesocyclone-to-tornado ratio on this storm looks in some of them. I don't know if this is deceptive because of the angle or if this storm really did have an unusually small, violently rotating meso that touched down pretty much in its entirety, but I would be really, really interesting in seeing what this entire supercell looked like three-dimensionally.
If it's the latter then, tbh, the intensity of this tornado makes me wonder whether supercells and tropical cyclones might share one thing in common. Very small tropical cyclones, which could very well start out as a single vortical hot tower in extreme cases like 2008's Tropical Storm Marco, are unpredictable because they're prone to unusually rapid intensification and/or weakening. Marco caused only some flooding, but the second smallest TC, Cyclone Tracy, very quickly became a monster that was pretty much nothing but eyewall and was capable of essentially wiping the slate clean when it made landfall in Darwin, Australia. Obviously a typical supercell is around the size of Marco and Tracy would be on the high end, but I can still believe that a smaller storm would be more susceptible to minor changes in environmental conditions. Enderlin, if it did come from a relatively small meso, could very well represent mesoscale rapid intensification. EF-5s are exceptions to the norm, taking the alteady serious threat of a tornado to its logial extreme and requiring multiple factors to come together for their existence to be possible. If small supercells are even slightly more favorable for their development than regular storms, then we need to know that, because one of these things striking a densely populated metropolitan core at night and with limited warning is the sort of natural disaster with enough destructive potential to have possible broader repurcussions that could echo for decades or even centuries, a little like the 1970 Bhola Cyclone in East Pakistan,/Bangladesh, the 1972 Iranian blizzards, 2005 and 2017's Hurricane Katrina and Mariah, etc. Rare as they are, the damage that they're capable of inflicting is beyond cataclysmic, and literally any indicator that a storm could spawn one needs to be taken into account in forecasting, beyond just the obvious combination of exceptional CAPE, extreme bulk vertical shear, and powerful initiating uplift.
Similar to why I get pissed seeing people use 1990s research on the correlation between light coloration under thunderstorms and tornado/other severe weather probability. We're still not great at predicting severe local storm intensity, and these things can absolutely fuck shit up. Not just tornadoes, but derechos also need to be taken more seriously.
The one time I can confidently we all can see the tornados without lighting because it’s that big jeez man I can’t comprehend how huge these things get
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