As I was about to call it a day the storm near Startford had a quick core collapse

Gusty winds and small bits of hail were forced out of the core and everything just collapsed

As I headed home I took this shot of the storm near Stratford just before it began to fade off the radar

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

Hint hint - your looking for it sometime after 5PM

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

This is a hand analysis I made using the operational 00Z NAM forecast for the afternoon of May 3rd.

A quick 15 minute rough analysis I threw together just before 11AM. The red box was the area I figured was best for storms and proved to be bang on. So I'm pretty happy it all worked out!

The CU field just prior to storm initiation in Alma, ON.

Storm begin rocketing up. This is looking north towards Arthur from Wellington Rd 12 north of Parker.

The first storm I intercepted. This storm produced a good scattering of 1/2 - 1 cm sized hail but went on to produce hail up to 2 cm in diameter just to my east.

This is one of the melting larger hail stones the first storm went on to produce.

This storm was the tail-end charlie at the time. It quickly matured to my west and virtually trained over my head. I had to edge out of the core as the hail stones began to get loud & had me worried about vehicle body damage. You can see in the above image good inflow/outflow mixing at the rear of the storm. There was subtle rotation with good warm inflow to be had.

These were the hail stones that dinged my car and forced me to back away from the core. Pretty hard stuff! Jen (the girlfriend) had some nice nail polish on. I submitted this photo to Environment Canada shortly after I took it for verification. The Environment Canada met (Arnold) commented that it was a nice nail polish LOL.

Here is the storm cell continuing to mature as it edges eastward just north of Arthur. There was excellent low level inflow and a brief wall-cloud area within the broader rotation formed but dissipated quickly. You can see a huge bulb of cold outflow driven scud directly above the road to the north of the storm (left). Substantial local flooding was occurring as some places received a months worth of rain in a matter of minutes.

Now the storm was at the strongest it would get. Wonderful structure with a 70 dBz core on radar and weak rotation in the base radial products.