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| To put things into perspective, I was not expecting much today, at least not in the way of supercells but as it would turn out the Lake Huron breeze happily changed all that. There was an area of decent cape with decent shear and what I would describe as an okay cu field stretching from Goderich over towards the Oakville - Halton area. |
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| You can clearly see where the breeze boundary is sitting with respect to things and what appears to be a mixed flow further north, remember there are scattered rain showers and stuff still up there as visible on the satellite. |
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| You can clearly see the Huron breeze creating a convergence zone directly along it to east and notice how the cu field build in a line from the NW to the SE slightly towards the northern tip of the convergence zone. Well that marks another boundary, I have to investigate it more but it is most likely something left over from the rain showers earlier or possibly another lake effect boundary. If you look closely you will also notice the formation of weak cloud streets in the cu field to the east of the Huron breeze, that is a primary indication that there is a good shear environment and "rolls' are appearing in the clouds. |
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| You will notice now that the boundary marking the northern edge of the cu field has pushed farther south and the Huron breeze is tilted to the east considerably. Not surprisingly the storm has formed right at the point of intersection and is travelling east along the northern boundary effectively giving the storm some ESE motion before it decides to rotate and make its own calls. |
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| In the above images you will notice how the storm appears to have a hook, this is actually an RFD based feature but I don't think it is a true hook in the sense that the RFD is wrapping around the meso or funnel cloud, however there was a very distinct wall cloud at the time based on what other chasers saw and reported. |
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| Naturally leaving late I had to race west on the 407 to intercept the storm cell, fortunately I made the right call and was able to intercept it near the 407 & Guelph line. It had a wonderful updraft with very little if any flanking line. Slow but evident rotation was visible. |
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| Driving up to the RFB and finally pulling onto the shoulder I watched a chunk of cloud almost directly over my head spin and churn with what appeared to be a weak horizontal funnel that crossed the road. I tried to grab some video but the mount did not allow me to do that. The lightning was not very intense but there were some good CG's from the core which was greenish in colour. Radar at this time indicated 1.5 inch hail but I doubt that anything bigger than 1/4 inch was hitting the ground. The storm was still tornado warned at the time but there was nothing on the ground and no visible signs of anything being rain wrapped. |
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| After watching for a while I decided it was best to head back south to get a better view since trees were plentiful in my previous position. Following the storm towards Lake Ontario, it exhibited this lowering which was interesting but posed no threat. |
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| A portion of the storms updraft. |
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| As the storm moved over the lake it eventually collapsed leaving behind pretty much nothing. |
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| While watching the storm I sort of saw this over my shoulder, it is a little horseshoe vortex from a dissipated cumulus cloud. I actually hung up on Patrick to film this. |
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| After making a few runs to the news stations I headed off towards hwy 88 & the 400. There is a nice hill up that way which I often use as a perch for lightning. There was an impressive squall line coming in from the NW and the canwarn nets were very busy with activity. There were reports of trees down and boats flipped over coming in constantly from the Georgian Bay region. The image above shows the anvil from the storms travelling SE. They were still a good 40 minutes away from my location. |
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| Looking north the skies slowly darken about 30 minutes before the squall line rolls in, the haze was very thick and made visibility poor. It was also about 32.5C with a good strong SW wind which made standing outside uncomfortable, I also had to be careful as the camera would fog up between the car and the outside air. |
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| I took this image with the storms still a good 25 minutes away, I was prepared for blinding rain and damaging winds, I decided to put the roof light up (GOOD IDEA!!!) and had the poncho ready in the backseat with the laptop and live radar running keeping me up to date. I also had the portable HAM radio sitting on the hood so I could listen to the canwarn reports and call in anything if I needed to without having to run back to the car. Both scanner in the vehicle were running but I was too far away from the areas getting hit at the time really hear anything. You can see my cell phone (glowing blue) through the back window as it downloads radar data. |
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| The storm was only about 10 minutes out by this time and finally started to become visible, sfc obs at the time were reporting visibilites of about 13km. Generally speaking that meant if it traveled roughly 13km in 10 minutes the storm would have been moving at around 78 km/h SE. Not too shabby! |
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| The storm finally hit and some strong winds came in, I was actually expecting them to be much stronger. I guess you could say I was sort of disappointed. On the radar the squall line was actually a series of smaller storm cells which formed clusters that were quite broad and looked like teeth, essentially tilted SW - NE. The strongest winds were right along the leading edge of the storms by the tilt. Unfortunately that also meant you would get blasted by rain just about instantly as the wind came in. I was between cells when the meso-front passed which explains the not so strong winds and provided with me a good dry area to keep filming in. |
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| After playing on the hill for a little while I decided I would take another shot at the storm and figured I could probably punch out of it and get hit a second time. As that thought crossed my wind this cg crossed the sky. |
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| There was a potent cluster forming one of the predominant teeth in the line which was quickly heading over from the Shelburne - Orangeville area. As I headed west towards the 400 on hwy 88 I was blasted by the strong wind from the cluster and bits of leaves, twigs and stuff were blowing by. It is not very evident in the video but it sure was hard to drive without being blown into oncoming traffic. |
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| Finally on hwy 400 blasting south to get out of the squall line! |
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| This is just as I approached King Rd, ironically both the shelf and I passed King Rd at the exact same time. Racing out of the storms was easy, what was neat was the blowing dust. There was dust all over the road blowing around like drifting snow. I was passing the dust drifts at about 20 km/h so I was making good time on the storm. The temperature also climbed back to 32C from a much cooler 21C back on hwy 88. |
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| I exited at Major Mackenzie and headed west towards my home as the squall line quickly approached (again!). |
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| This was an awesome view, there was no wind at the time as only the upper portion of the shelf-deck had passed, you can see the lights from Vaughan (Woodbridge) off to the west and a rain curtain with a small rain foot blowing out. |
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| The winds again were not all that strong and again I was between teeth! LOL |
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| The winds kicked up dust
from a nearby freshly plowed field about 30 meters or more into the air, this cloud
drifted over Toronto and was eventually illuminated by the city lights. While I was
filming this I did hear a rustling band type sound come from behind me. I turned around to
find 3 Willow trees had come down about 1/2 a km away out in an open field. The winds were
blowing hard but they were probably only about 60km at the time possibly, and I stress,
possibly gusting to 70km/h. All in all a fun day! |
