Electric Flame in the Vault

This was an amazingly vibrant tornadic thunderstorm north of Pampa, Texas, on May 23, 2002. This was at the beginning of digital photography and was captured with an Olympus digital camera at 9pm local time (CDT). This bolt shot horizontally out of the vault region of the supercell where hail is the most intense. It illuminated the bell-shaped rotating updraft that was measured to have tops close to 50,000 ft in the air. What you see illuminated is the entire storm which was rotating rapidly.