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It seems half the time I see things, it was in the process of looking for something else. I was waking early to hopefully see some river steam again, though earlier this time. It was -13F in the area when I went to sleep around 1 a.m. I knew clouds were coming but I did not think they'd affect things too quickly. Well, the clouds moved over around probably 5 a.m. and temps warmed rapidly. You could see exactly where this cloud shield was by looking at the surface temps on a surface plot. Pretty cool. The temp by the time I got up around 6 a.m. was already above 0. I was like, crap, probably won't be any river steam now(since the river is full of ice and it seems to need -10 or lower). I look out my window and see this strange low cloud deck, layered in a rather cool fashion. I knew what it was right away, or at least I figured what it HAD to be. I was thinking, that has to be clouds created from the cargil corn milling plant on the east side of town. When it is cold they create plenty of steam, but they VERY rarely do this here. The plant has been here around 15 years I think and I've only seen this one other time(HERE). And hell, I worked down there for about 5 years and not one single morning did I ever see it. What was special about these two instances was the fact the steam was not evaporating. It'd go up, hit a certain height and spread northward as clouds...for miles. The conditions for this to happen are obviously quite rare. So when I looked out and saw it, after seeing my river steam hopes were nill now, I was very excited. Off I went. I only wish I had just stayed up all night, as my dad told me later that day it was like this around 3 a.m. I was quickly running out of night as I got there and setup.
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Here is a larger crop from the first image. You can see the light pillars towards the center.
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It obviously makes for some interesting night photography. Absolutely all of those clouds are coming from the steam. It's sort of funny to think I've seen way more tornadoes than I have seen this happen. I'd really like to understand how that happens. It can't be just when it's very saturated as that happens often, and this doesn't. It has to do with a temperature inversion somehow. That coloring to the sky off to the right is from Omaha.
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I moved to a new location and am now looking straight east. The street lights in this spot were rather red(hence red snow). As it got closer to sunrise it became harder to see the clouds, and distinguish them from the high level cirrus above.
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This was probably 45 minutes before the sunrise. That thin red line on the left, above the horizon, is the edge of that cloud cover that moved in.
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I wish I had done some longer exposures with the lens stopped down. The clouds and steam are in that "bad" blur zone, where they aren't blurred enough, but are just enough to look "off". There was little movement to them, so it would have taken a couple minute exposure to do it, most likely...something which didn't excite me in the near zero air.
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I drove over to Desoto thinking I had a tiny chance at seeing sun pillars under that cloud deck....I was way off. Family of deer here crossing the frozen lake. Shutter 1/13th at 360mm...handheld....yay for IS(background is sharp, even though the moving deer are not). 1600 ISO jumps out a bit in the snow.
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Well there was certainly steam before I woke up, since the trees along the bank were well coated. So there had to be more steam than the other morning, since that morning the trees were not coated. That is the nuke plant on the left, cargil's steam can be seen on the right, streaming northwest as those clouds. Their coverage was going down rapidly from the moment I woke up. I should have stayed up and went out....sigh. Maybe the next time I'll have more time. I saw them the last time in February 2003, soooooo, look for that update around February or January 2013. That is nuts this is the frequency I've seen it do this.
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