And Then the Sky Dropped

Here are a couple of pictures of yesterday's storm, just minutes before it hit. We were in Minnesota at The Nature Conservancy's Red Rock Prairie doing a transect when the sky turned dark. (More on transecting later.) You can see some of my group in the second picture, walking toward the van. We drove away from the storm, but watched the wind and nearly horizontal rain whip the grasses around and pound the prairie flat. The radio said that the winds were around sixty mph. We returned after lunch, about an hour later, to a sunny but humid field.