I think the car in the left half of the image is a Chevy Cobalt, this poor guy was one of the last cars to attempt to cross the flooded roadway before police could fully close the road.

Like I said, the water was around a blind corner

The northbound lanes of the Don Valley Parkway were less flooded than the southbound but cars we more susceptible to problems and hydroplaning since the water was around a blind corner.

The first casualty of the Don River was this poor guy who needed to literally be pushed out of the road turned river

This suburban overtook the BMW which was having serious electrical issues after hitting the water too quickly.

This is a photo I love to pause and stare at, it's one of those shots where you just imagine yourself in this guys place or at least in the passenger seat beside him. What would be going through your mind and what was probably going through his mind? It really is one of those "oh $#!^" moments when you realize your the only person doing whatever it is your doing and then look up to find about a hundred other people staring at you with a dazed look.

To put this into perspective, the Don Valley Parkway was closed for a solid hour, maybe more? How this guy got onto the freeway is a mystery to me, but he should have wondered when he was the only car on the road for at least a few kilometers why that was the case? Then of course when he came to the flooding he decided to try and cross, bad idea right? I don't know if he could hear, but a few trouble makes, myself included started yelling "swim swim swim". I was more curious to see if he was going to try and keep going, you'll note how deep the water is ahead where it is completely overrunning the crash barrier on the left side of the image.

The Dundas ramp and all lanes of the Northbound DVP were obviously closed, you can see just how high the water was even at this point which is pretty far from the river.

This is interesting, earlier in the night a couple cars which stalled out began floating around the center of the image (fourth light down from the top right corner) and that was at least an hour or more prior to this image, so at this point only the largest of trucks could have made it through.

Title says it all.

Today was one of those days, the morning was cloudy, foggy and cool, the forecast was for thunderstorms and depending on which model you wanted to believe it was bang or bust. The surface observations and meso-analysis data suggested a good amount of shear, low cloud levels thanks to the ample moisture, good visibility but limited energy. The whole forecast was basically based on surface observations and satellite data augmented by the meso scale RAP RTMA data which I like to use to sort of fill in the blanks. At the end of this set I'll get into some technical discussion about what made this storm special and why it did or did not do whatever it did. Anyway, the target was somewhere around Arthur and this storm fired up near Grand Bend along a surface trof riding under a mid level moisture plume. The storm quickly developed and tracked north but really looked like crap on radar, and I mean just CRAP! Dave Patrick and I who met up just north of Aurther raced north on hwy 6 as the storm came into view and were greeted by this rapidly developing wall cloud.

This was really one of those "wow, it going to probably drop a tornado soon, I feel like I'm in Oklahoma" moments. Usually structure this good in Southern Ontario means batten down the hatches and this was really a ground scraping wall cloud!

As the storm continued on, the strong 20km/h southerly inflow quickly turned to a gusty westerly flow as the rear flank downdraft kicked down and around. Look at the way the grass is leaning towards the bottom of the picture, it's leaning towards the right (east) since the photo was taken looking north. Dave was so impressed he was almost wandering around aimlessly in awe, video camera in hand forgetting to record!

The first really great chase day of the May season! I like to make photos interesting, and perspective is key! Just as Dave was pointing up at some of the rotating scud getting sucked in near the rear of the wall cloud I was able to snap this photo of him pointing! This was definitely one of the more awe inspiring weather moments I've had in Southern Ontario!

As the storm chugged along northeast from Mount Forest towards Shelburne it began to undercut itself since the RFD kick was so intense.

Despite this undercutting, the storm was actively cycling and working to produce a new wall cloud and again present another opportunity to produce an elusive Southern Ontario tornado.

Positioning ahead of the storm once again, this time just west of Shelburne in the wind farm area it was amazing to see the storm sucking up moisture and continuing to produce dangly things.

Getting closer to the storm it was doing some crazy stuff, it was neat to see the storm pull in and directly ingest what appeared to be fog from the surface. This really let's you see how a parcel of air get's into the storm and the path it takes. You can see how on the way up the air is twisting and coming in from an angle instead of going straight in and up.

Sadly, the storm was moving quickly and getting into a less chaser friendly area as it neared the edge of the Niagara Escarpment. A couple neat things happened, a combination of tree scud and pooled moisture that was overrun by the warm boundary or forced up the escarpment allowing up slope cooling created dense pools of fog which get sucked into the storm making for some cool skies. (no pun intended) Secondly, while out in what was essentially the middle of nowhere Dave and I ran into Todd Rittinger, or well we were parked and he ran into us! This is the second time I've run into another storm chaser in the field in Southern Ontario this year. It was a brief encounter but nice to meet Todd finally!

While we gave up and storm and watched it wander into the area north of Barrie (and eventually cottage country) I was intrigued by this weak "stuff" moving in from the west.

Trees blowing in the rain and wind.

Lot's and lot's of rain!

This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy, people see these little wisps of crap, which are really just pockets of low scud, tree scud, fog, whatever! Yes, it's rising, yes it's round, yes it might even appear to spin and above all it's under the base of the storm but it's not a tornado! It's just rising air that's super saturated and condensing. Unless it's lifting dust and debris, rotating rapidly, has a smooth laminar appearance and it's connected to a funnel cloud it's not a tornado and it never was... it's garbage! Heck, even if this was a tornado, I would be ashamed to call it a tornado. The problem is over zealous storm spotters, emergency officials and the general public sometimes see these things and really really want them to be tornadoes, so much so they overlook the bigger picture and call them in as just that. I use this basic rule of thumb, if you show your buddy who knows nothing about clouds a photo and he doesn't right away point and say "nice tornado", yeah it's not a tornado. Maybe I'm just being anal, but hell I'm so sick of people calling garbage tornadoes it drives me nuts! Storm chasers do it too, sometimes you'll have tiny vorticies spin up under wall clouds and they'll briefly appear to dance along the ground. These vorticies are more eddy in nature than they are tornado, usually wall clouds that produce these little spin ups are rotating violently and there's so much air mixing, some rising, some sinking and within that mixing little pockets of rotation will get stretched and briefly appear as tighter vorticies with limitied or no connection to the cloud base. Sometimes the wall cloud associated with all this mixing will go on to produce a real tornado, sometimes it wont, but you can sure as hell bet some chasers sit there and go "that's one tornado, oh looks there's another, that's a second tornado" and within about 5 minutes they've seen ten or more tornadoes... yeah, please give me a break! By that method every time I see the leaves swirl on the ground I'll call it a tornado too. Next time I see a dust devil that'll be a really strong F0 tornado. By this rule I've probably seen 30 tornadoes in the last 2 days! Okay, rant over, point made.

On my way back home after the chase, I followed the storm which had rolled through Erin back towards my house. The storm blew through with my home taking a direct hit. The rainfall rates of 325 mm/hr were impressive but the highest wind gust was only 42 km/h, right in line with the winds in Erin. There was this neat rainfoot structure, you can see the rain falling and then blowing out and along the ground. It's actually a combination of fog and rain from the super saturated air at the ground. Cool to see.

379 km

Today was one of those wait and see and hope and wish and drive type days. All the moisture, energy and instability was contained to southern and central Michigan as a warm front lifted north across much of the Northeast U.S and Southeastern Canada. Earlier in the week models had shown storms erupting across southwestern and southcentral Ontario around the dinner hour but as the forecast day drew closer, the incoming trough aloft slowed down and ushered in more capped air in the mid levels leaving the cooler less stable air farther west. This meant that here in Southern Ontario we were widely out of luck, but the HRRR did have one interesting card up its sleve. It showed the stuff in Michigan to eventually go linear and turn into an MCS (this was widely supported by the the mid and upper level wind fields). The MCS was then supposed to rapidly begin accelerating east across Lake Huron and blast into Southern Ontario with the nose of the forecast bow-echo to land somewhere around Teeswater which agreed well with the actual surface observations and radar data. My biggest fear was that the stable marine air over Lake Huron would kill the line of storms long before they had a chance to hit Canadian soil as is sometimes the case. I was concerned because they were going to be outpacing the more unstable air and moving into a more and more capped atmosphere. I tried to take a nap because I was tired and had to work overnight after the chase but the tornado action in Oklahoma kept me awake and then I watched as Moore was taken off the map again much like it had been on May 3rd 1999. It was horrific to watch but at the same time kept me glued to the live streams. After getting virtually no sleep, the HRRR forecast began to validate as the storms in Michgan began to line out and blast eastward. I jumped in the truck and took off. I spoke to fellow chaser Dave Patrick on the phone, he was farther west than I was and in good position. Looking at the radar I figured I had another hour or so before I would be into the squall line since it was only over central Lake Huron at about the time I was entering the Town of Lucknow. I immediately called Dave to see what was going on in front of me and he said it was blasting him with dirt and gustnadoes. I was sort of stunned since the storms were still so far away on radar, or at least that's where the precipitation was. I didn't notice it at the time, but if you look near the horizon you'll see a brown wall of dust just above it! I was so busy getting the graduated ND on the camera and aligning everything so perfectly I did not realize that the interior of my car was going to get pretty dusty soon.

The storm looked okay, it was far from producing anything impressive and the colours were pretty bland but I was still excited to see if there were any good winds on the leading edge. I was absolutely dieing to test a new Inspeed anemometer that I had purchased just for purposes like this!

As soon as the storm came within a good close view, I grabbed my video camera and began getting video. This is one of those things that makes far better video than it does a still photo. With the video you have motion, action and sound, with the still photo, all you really have is just a moment in time, which sometimes does little to illustrate what happens or is about to happen next. So video from this point on took priority!

This is just the coolest things! It was incredibly dry across much of Southern Ontario for a good part of May and a late planting season saw many farmers tilling their fields just days prior to this storm rolling in. The barren and dusty fields created an amazing display, it's not like seeing strong straight line winds or a tornado, it's more like a feeling of "that's just cool!" without actually shouting that out.

At about this time somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking "it's getting close, that's a lot of dust, should I stay out and get hit, what about the camera and lens? Wait, my truck windows are rolled down!"

I managed to jump into the truck and get the windows and doors closed just as the wall of dust hit. I kept shooting video through the windshield with both the Canon XH-A1 and on my Sony Handycam I have mounted on the dash.

Like I said, this was the first time I had the ability to actually put the Inspeed Anemometer to the test, I was hoping and probably expecting stronger winds but the absolute highest gust I measured while on the hill, outside of Lucknow was 50.3 km/h, hardly a severe gust! Heck, you'd be lucky if that tipped over your trash can.

Now knowing the storms outflow was only moving at around 50km/h peak I knew I could keep pace and get back out in front of the storm for a second round. I actually had my camera at this point mounted to my window and was able to snap this shot while looking for somewhere to stop. The contrast was pretty cool!

The gustfront was spinning up all sorts of eddies glorified as gustnadoes. COOL!

The dust made visibility in places poor.

As night turns to day slowly, the morning rays of sunshine reveal showers produced by elevated thunderstorms moving in along a warm front.

Here's a radar shot showing the first target storm as it tracked southeast from Shelburne. You can see it is the dominant storm cell in the line. At around this time I'm making my way east on the 407 to head north on the 404 for an intercept.

This was one of the few dominant storm cells approaching me from the west. I raced north along highway 404 and stopped on Stouffville Rd just east of the highway. The thunder and lightning was nearly continuous as the storm moved ever closer. It seemed far more intense than it really was.

The storm cell was still highly elevated, it produced some small pea sized hail and heavy rain. There was virtually no wind at the surface. You can see the back side of the storm as it passes, this particular shot was taken looking Southeast.

Here's my position relative to the storm to give you a better idea of what I was seeing.

Fresh towering cumulus going up to my immediate west along a turbulent zone of convergence and mixing aloft near the leading edge of the prior convection.

This was the second storm cell which later spiked on radar. When this photo was taken it was still in its infancy but at this point the surface warm front was getting closer and it was later in the day so boundary layer mixing was increasing. This allowed the storm to mix down further and at least appear to be getting closer to the ground.

A little while later the same storm seen in the previous image is now east of me and beginning to hit 65dbz on the radar. You can see the rain shafts from the storm directly in front of the power lines.

Here's the radar showing how intense the storm actually appeared on radar despite its benign appearance visually.

This is a stylized image of the storm as it continues eastward. I've used a graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky and create this vibrant image. At this point the storm was hitting 68 dBz and producing some small hail. A warning for Durham Region was issued, and this storm eventually made its way out over Lake Ontario. I tried to keep pace with the storm but gave up, it was moving at well over 80 km/h.

The setup for storms was driven by a low scooting just north of Lake Erie and Ontario, the supercells in Southcentral and Southeastern Ontario formed along the warm front where a marine / lake breeze boundary interacted with the surface warm front and trigger storms

A weak elevated supercell in a low energy but moderate shear environment approaches Milton

The storm is now passing through Milton, you can see mid level clouds flowing into the storm from the Southeast (image looking west). It also presents a bit of a vaulted type structure with the usual lateral tilt of the updraft. Slight clearing between the "hail" region of the core and the heavier rain is visible just to the right of center. The biggest problem with this storm if any is the fact that it remained elevated with limited boundary layer interaction and hence produce virtually nothing as far as wind at the surface.

Inflow / outflow and rain as the storm passes overhead and looses some of its structure

Here a screenshot from PYKL3 (Android radar software) showing my location and a weak couplet appearing on the NWS Buffalo Nexrad radar.

Here's the Meso Analysis sounding for a point nearest the storm at the given time. You'll notice the storm is entirely elevated with very little cape and very low topped since the LFC/CCL EL is ~7km. lon=-79.813855 lat=43.555635

The hodograph data shows little in the way of dynamic shear, all the veering in this ground relative hodoraph is below any of the convective instability.

The storm relative hodograph shows a very different story, veering winds with supportive inflow exist well above the ground into the mid levels allowing the storm to still rotate (although very slowly) despite being elevated. This explains why this storm took on a supercellular structure.

Hard to believe that less than a week after the ice storm I was out chasing a large ragged bowing squall line with temperatures around 25 Celsius. April is really a month of extremes!

Storm motion with this bowing segment was 59 degrees (Northeast) at 57 knots (105 km/h) You'll see how the storm progressively bows as it progresses north along the line

Here's a quick screen grab from my tablet showing the radar at the end of my storm chase day. You'll notice the a large bowing segment heading off towards Uxbridge, that there is the storm which bowed out right over my head in Bolton/Caledon.

A smattering of ice pellets cover the roof of a home in Leaside, Toronto as the first wave of precipitation from the impending storm moves in

The low elevation of Leaside in Toronto allowed the snow up north to instead fall as ice pellets down in the city. The expected change over to rain was stunted as more cold air flooded in and mixing began to occur aloft.

Commuters in Brampton near hwy 50 & Queen St get on a Zoom bus as heavy wet snow falls. The snow was not expected, a combination of colder air flooding in and additional mixing aloft meant that the precipitation, which was supposed to remain as ice pellets eventually changing to rain fell almost entirely as snow with the first wave of precipitation.

A "surprise" winter storm blankets Langstaff Rd just west of hwy 27 with a coating of wet snow. This unusual late season storm left many municipalities unprepared to treat the icy road surfaces and commence plowing operations. The snow also created an additional forecast element not forseen, with a fresh blanket on the ground it meant that temperatures were able to remain cooler longer and this would aid in the freezing rain process which would begin with the second wave of precipitation much later in the day towards evening.

Normally at this time of the year the first spring sprouts are shooting out of the ground, but that seems unlikely given the fresh coating of snow.

This was the radar image at the time showing just where the snow, ice pellets, freezing rain and normal rain sat. You can see the blues and purples (snow) effecting the GTA and areas eastward while much of the Hamilton, Halton and western portions of Mississauga were seeing a good mix of ice pellets (orange). Further south, along the QEW on the south shore of Lake Ontario most of the precipitation was falling as rain (green) and to the west a pocket of freezing rain (pink) had developed over Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph and other surrounding communities due to cold air damming at the surface.

As I started my missing late at nigh to find freezing rain as the second wave of precipitation moved in ice accretion was rapidly building. Here, a road sign stands frozen near Caledon.

The streets of Orangeville required a pair of well sharpened skates.

A driver heads west along an ice covered Broadway in downtown Orangeville

Glazed city streets

Looking at this photo it sure does not look like April 1st, and no this is not an April fool's joke I've concocted, it's a not a joke at all! Mother nature decided that we've not had enough winter this year and it seems even with balmy days between they are simply teasers. (There has been no Photoshop work done to this photo, it was taken purely using a Cokin graduated tobacco coloured filter)

My car (not visible but right of the frame) was actually partially blocking a lane. It was all fine and dandy since there was no traffic and this snow was low drifting stuff. Then just as a few cars came into view the wind started blasting and the drifting snow became a low visible wall of white a few feet tall. It was more than tall enough to shroud my car from any unsuspecting drivers so I made haste and got out of here as quickly as I could!

I'm not sure if the municipalities or province for that matter still has any salt in reserves. Whatever the case, this highway was just glazed over! I almost wiped out just stepping foot outside of my car! April 1st huh? Sure feels like I'm north of the Arctic Circle, not north of Orangeville.

This is the 0 visibility stuff blowing where I was parked. Yeah, not a good idea!

There were tons of little snow devils (vorticity pockets known correctly as eddies) dancing around in the fields. Unfortunately, what looked cool to my eye looked like crap to my camera. But for the record, you can see the winds and squalls made things nasty in these exposed places.

Here are some of the cellular convective snow squalls heading southeast into the Greater Toronto Area (I'm looking southwest). Some of the tops on these squalls must have been pretty high but I did not see any lightning returns on any of my services. (Again no Photoshop, just that Cokin Tobacco filter)

Yeah, the car was clean! I decided after the fact this was a bad idea, seeing as I was actually getting dirty! Note to self, don't unnecessarily go out of the way to drive through snow squalls when the car is clean!

No rainbows here, but the convective lake effect snow bands were so cellular in nature that you could literally be under a clear sky above while all around you snow is pouring down.

Just to illustrate the point.

This was highway 10 just north of Mono, as you can see this looks it typically does in the period between late November and early March. It sure is cruel to have it look like this in April, it's simply not funny!

Ever so slowly

Didn't need a sign to figure that out

Traffic creeps along highway 7 near Martin Grove Rd in Woodbridge

This homeward bound Honda with summer tires was heading nowhere quickly

This Mazada 3 driver attempts to make it home on a residential street

Vehicles struggle to make it up the Woodbridge Ave hill near Kipling.

Two vehicles face the wrong way on highway 401 in Toronto after colliding as part of a larger 5 car collision

My poor electric snow thrower had a hard time cutting through this 30 inch deep snow drift

This was one of hundreds of accidents that occurred along highway 401 in Toronto during the morning rush hour. Heavy snow and poor conditions made this morning a rush-hour from hell

Several hours after the snow stopped falling I began the task of diggin out

Weak towering cumulus clouds congealed to form a weak rain shower. This "storm" never amounted to anything.

New storms formed as a wave of activity pushed into the Windsor area. Storms formed near Oil Springs and expanded northward. This one cell formed ahead of the mess over London and had some brief interesting characteristics. This was taken near Arva looking south.

After the London storm was eaten by the more dominant storms to the west I headed north and watched as a meso-triple point (storm scale feature) came together just west of Ilderton.

An isolated cell formed north of the main body of the storm system just north of Ilderton and popped out a lowering

There was some major convergence & forcing between the two storms, cloud motions intesified and stuff was happening at 10's of meters per second.

This was a huge outflow scud bomb shelf thingy facing towards the inflow from the south

This was all inflow and there was violent mixing above my head with a sharp temperature increase outside of the car as inflow winds overcome any outflow.

What may have been a brief wall cloud or inflow/shelf feature formed and I shot video since photos would not do it justice. After the main action started to press east of my location I snapped this photo of a tail cloud. There was some major inflow action along it.

After the storm(s) lost their structure I punched back through what was a rainy core and emerged on the east side of the complex near St.Mary's

This was a crappy ragged shelf cloud, it looked cool (I guess all clouds look cool to me) but it posed zero threat,

This wide shot gives an idea of perspective with regards to the size and scope of the flooding.

Persistent local rains in excess of 50mm created localized flash flooding. These vehicles in Concord (Vaughan) became flood victims.

Illuminated by the not too distant city lights, a massive shelf cloud comes into view as it bares down on Milton

The shelf/roll cloud slowly getting closer

As the MCS moved towards Milton around 1:50AM a shelf cloud & roll cloud developed

The 8AM surface map paiting the setup for the day. The MCS visible over WI/MI would later be the trigger point for the convection

The meso NAM bufkit data looked alright, there was plenty of energy to be had and while support was no great there was enough instability to kick off some good storms

The real-time MESO analysis RAP soundings around the time storms started to fire up

This was the first storm of the day, it formed in a triple point convergence zone between lake breeze boundaries and an outflow wave from the MCS which was now crossing Georgian Bay

Here's the storm a little later on in life

Just after this photo Mark Robinson and I bailed and left the Innisfil storm to go chase storm which were forming to our immediate west

A shelf cloud on the leading edge of the MCS outflow near Beeton, ON

Here is the shelf cloud approaching

This is pretty self explanatory. It was neat to see dust and other small debris blowing, winds were kicking up into the mid 50's with maybe an isolated gust as high as 60.

Tower going up on the western flank of what remained of the outflow in Vaughan

Mark Robinson and I spent the better part of the afternoon waiting for initiation which never came. We agreed it was a bust and went our ways. Just as I started east along hwy 9 towards the 400 a developing tower to my north with faint echoes on radar caught my attention.

This is how I planned to document what was quickly turning into a bust, beautiful crepuscular rays in Orangeville

Surprised I was! What started as a faint echo over Georgian Bay quickly grew and morphed into a beautiful mothership of a supercell which I intercepted near Baxter, ON.

Words can't describe what was going through my mind! The structure was unreal, and winds were south-easterly veering to southerly before a dry but still warm RFD kicked passed.

The storm did briefly produce a well defined wall cloud, but more impressive was the notched out RFD cut at the back of the storm

Easily the best structure of the year so far in Ontario. I can't believe there was no significant severe weather. It was a great storm!

Here is the 9PM meso-analysis sounding for the nearest airport effected by the supercell, by this time the supercell was passing through Baxter and south of Borden

Here is the 8PM meso-analysis sounding for the nearest airport effected by the supercell

As the day went on the RAP model consistently increased the amount of surface energy present with shear and tornado indices increasing

This was the first RAP model I really dug deep into. Numerous key shear elements were coming together to make the day "interesting"

Here's the core literally falling out of the storm over Milverton looking west from Poole

Near stationary storm near Poole, Ontario