Satellite Shots: Big Thunderstorms in Texas, Mexico

Huge thunderstorms exploded late Wednesday afternoon in southern Texas and northern Mexico (unfortunately no help to the fires further north). Similar storms further west in the country caused a sewage flood and a record hailstorm last weekend. Here's what it looked like on the MapSpace Rad/Sat:

As you can see from the radar overlay, the actual thunderstorms themselves (which exploded into this cloud complex) are quite small comparatively.

This shot from AccuWeather.com RadarPlus shows the exploding storms on visible satellite and also positive polarity lightning, which accounts for around 20% of cloud-to-ground lightning strokes. The bumpy texture that you see is the "overshooting tops" of the thunderstorms, where updrafts punch out through the more stable top of the anvil cloud.

Here's a great sequence of visible satellite images throughout the evening:

Winds high in the atmosphere at 500 millibars (nearly 20,000 feet or so), which is where general steering currents reside, were west to east, which is why the thunderstorm anvil cloud is out ahead of the storm. But the overshooting tops punched through to even higher, and you can see their tops being streamed southeast over the general anvil, because prevailing winds (shown below) were Northwest to Southeast:

On the other hand, there could be another (tasty) reason...