Today’s ride took me past Eagle Lake in Del City. The trail I’m on at the time of this photo connects with OKC’s Eagle Lake Trail, heading to the First Americans Museum (FAM). The crews are still doing a lot of dirt work at the FAM, so there’s still no proper bikeway there, nor is there a valid detour. Notice how the skies have only some thin stratus clouds in the background. That will change.
The Canada geese around here seldom do anything alone, but this one goose was waddling along the South River Trail. Just so you’ll know: The rest of the gaggle was behind me where I stood on a rise to capture this scene. There’s a boat ramp to the right and storms forming far to the south of OKC in the background. From the low angle of the sun, you can tell it’s quite early in the morning. If storms are forming around dawn, the air over the state is unsettled. There will be more.
None of this is really new scenery, just the same old stuff I see every week, but from a different perspective. This is the middle dam on the Oklahoma River Recreation Area. There is a slight flow, in part because we’ve had some rain in the state off and on for the past week or so. This is the North Canadian River and it sources way out west in New Mexico, running through the western part of Oklahoma before it gets to OKC. Later today it got some more rain, with storms that blew down power poles northwest of OKC.
This is that same line of storms in the second image, now bigger and closer to OKC. They didn’t cause problems for the capital, but dumped a little rain in places like Tuttle and Mustang, from what I hear. Because of how the atmosphere is unstable, and we have no mountains high enough to interfere for a very long way in all directions, storms in this area can rise while you watch. These developed rather quickly.
This line of clouds northeast of OKC mark the boundary of an unstable air mass. We could call it a storm front, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not moving much. Later in the day from this picture it was part of what provoked some pop-up storms about a hundred miles northwest of OKC that collapsed and pushed out some fierce wind gusts with damage to power lines. But there was rainfall all around the state.
After I got home, this storm cloud rose up very quickly later in the day. Within minutes it expanded in all directions and thundered a bit. I didn’t see any lightning strike the ground, nor did I see any rainfall by the time I posted this. Still, our weather today is rather dramatic statewide.
