Popcorn Anyone?

Nope we aren't serving up any food today, but Mother Nature might serve up a couple of popcorn thunderstorms. A popcorn thunderstorm is a storm that develops during the late afternoon hours in a single cellular fashion. These storms typically don't produce a lot of rainfall, and usually fizzle out after sunset.

Popcorn thunderstorms follow this evolution. During the morning hours, sunlight rapidly warms the air near the surface of the earth. That warmer air at the surface is less dense than the cooler air above it. This causes the air parcel to begin to rise. That rising air starts the development of clouds and eventually a thunderstorm. Once the sun sets, we lose our heat source. Without that warm air at the surface, we lose most of the mixing in the atmosphere and our conditions become fairly stable. -ADAM