The storm

Damn, I wish I had the digicam with me, and furthermore that the digicam wasn't broken. I'd have some amazing photos of the seriously strange cloud formations I saw this morning as I drove toward the leading edge of a storm.

I first noticed it as I made my way up Sheridan Road: the clouds were banding light and dark, and tilted about 20° clockwise toward Lake Michigan (which was only a few hundred yards to my right.) As I got closer I realized the light bands weren't clouds but actually breaks in the clouds -- as if the layers of clouds weren't able to mix, like a huge floated drink. The delineation was so sharp and the clouds were so low that I could see the swirling edges of each cloud layer as they dipped toward the lake to pick up more moisture.

As I curved around onto Lake-Cook, I saw that behind the leading edge, the clouds were billowing and swirling as if the air below them was impenetrable, and strange shapes and whorls formed. I reached into the back seat and grabbed the Holga plastic camera I'd been using to take pictures of salvage trucks and snapped a few shots of the formations while I waited at a stoplight. I kept expecting to see a funnel descending from the waves, but none did.

It took awhile before I reached the rain front behind the roiling cloudbank, where it seemed as if the lower air mass that was putting up such a strong fight closer to the lake finally gave up and let the rain come down. As I neared work, the rain let up and the sky returned to a milder form of the waves and whorls I saw earlier on. A coworker said that she saw several people pulled over taking pictures of the sky on her way to work, marvelling at the same phenomena I witnessed.