A Little Early For Independence Day

Reminding me very much of the invading alien spacecraft taking up their positions in our skies in the 1996 film Independence Day, this rogue supercell produced an impressive looking wall cloud north of Cedar Rapids, Iowa on May 30, 2002. I was surprised to hear thunder while indoors that evening as the western sky was clear and sunny, so I went outside to see what it was all about. My son and I went up on top of our roof to get a better look at the structure and I captured video of it with my old Sony Handycam Vision Video 8 camcorder. This image, looking north over the Northbrook II residential development and taken at 7:40 PM, is a still captured from our TV screen taken with my Nikon DSLR camera. The isolated supercell moved in a southeasterly direction but slid north and east of our position. Curiously, no sirens sounded in Cedar Rapids, but did so in Marion as the storm passed over that city less than a half-hour later.