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| I left school around 3:30PM in an
attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, the 407 in Peel started to slow down, so I decided
my best route was to get north of the urban centers and take the backroads. As I headed
north, not only did the temperature rise from 22C to 24C but I also passed the odd cloud
sprinkling off precip, no doubt a very promising sign. I also noted a whole tone of sfc
based stratus and scud feeding into the developing cumulus field. I was sort of miffed
because I knew there was a decent chance for sfc based convection, I just figured the sfc
based storms would have been west of KW. |
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| Near the community of Sandhill I
pulled over and had to make a choice. The storms coming in from the west looked really
nice but I was worried about their vicinity to urban centers and traffic, I also had these
growing towers to the north-east which looked really good for a short time. I chose to
head west after the radar returns were not getting any better with towers to my NE. |
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| I stopped for a few minutes to
watch a tower go up in front of me. The base had some very will structured inflow and I
really did think that if this tower did become a storm I would have lucked out! |
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| Well it got closer and some of
the good looking structure turned out to be cumulostratus- garbage underneath, but what
really made me sad was that sunshine began to poke through the top! |
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| Heading SW and passing through
Halton Hills I got a call from Mark Rozitis telling me of the wonders of a meso detected
on the cell near Guelph. I did not have access to velocity data at the time but even
before he called I saw the cell veering out of the line and dropping to the ESE. I had
initially wanted to target that cell as it came over from the KW area but again I chose
not to because of traffic, naturally that storm cell I can't chase decides to put on a
show. At about the same time I could see some good towers and chunks of CB material
through a patch of clear sky off. I knew these cells were heading to the Milton area and
they looked to have some good hail in them at the time. |
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| I eventually passed through one
cell which did not have any hail and made my way south of Milton to intercept a second
storm coming across the escarpment from the northwest. Looking out towards the escarpment
I could see some scud action. I am not sure if it was just scud or partial inflow but it
was nice to see some typical summer like "stuff" associated with the storms. |
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| The second cell eventually came
in dropped even more rain just south of Milton. These photos were taken at the
intersection of Treemaine Rd & Lower Base Line W, just south of Milton near the
Oakville border. |
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| The water looked to be 15 - 50 cm
deep and spanned a good 200m chunk of road. This flooding was not isolated though, the
Bronte Creek was overflowing and covering a number of side roads, plus runoff from many
fields which were still full of ice had made many roads in the area virtual ponds. Another
portion of the road above had about 500m of water on it but the water was only 15cm deep
at the most. |
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| I decided to hang around the
Milton area as a number of the storm cells were showing evident signs of back building and
after speaking with Rob Kuhn on the phone to let him know there was minor flooding he told
me the radar also showed evident signs of back building. |
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| I decided to drop south into
Oakville and sat in the Wal-Mart just south of the 407, I would have gone farther south
but I wanted to avoid the houses and traffic. This was the last lightning producing storm
cell to pass me. |
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| In this photos you can see two
areas of inflow with two different storm cells. The first area can be seen towards center
left and is feeding a more distant storm cell. The second is directly in the middle of the
photo and is feeding the cell producing the precipitation visible on the right side of the
photo. For a short time there was some cool vertical scud action as stuff got sucked up,
there even a slight trace of rotation at one point. |
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| A little later on this hail shaft
thing (center of the picture) became visible, and then the storm quickly soon after. |
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| The temperature in Oakville was
around 19C when I first got there and sat in the Wal-Mart, only a short time later after a
number of storm cells had passed and what have been some lake cooled air rolled in the
temperature dropped to 13C and almost instantly the cu and tcu above began to go elevated.
You can see the TCU in the image above has tentacles spreading out from the base, this is
a common feature seen with elevated convection. |
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| Heading back home, this photo was
taken from the 401/403 looking SSW at the storm over the lake. |