I pulled over as soon as I got under the rain free base, or well maybe I'll just call it "the almost rain free base" since these bases up here in Southern Ontario seem to rarely be actually completely rain free. Just as a side note, I hate rain and getting wet, it has everything to do with getting into a car and being damp and then having the moisture evaporate to fog up your windows. It's also a pain in the butt to work with wet video and camera gear, plus your always exposing the gear to the possibility of damage and then those pesky water drops on the lens can easily ruin a good shot! Anyway, getting back to the chase, I was surprised to see as much flooding as there was when I stopped. I guess blasting through a storms core with limited visibility really removes you from seeing whats happening on the ground. I knew the storms today were going to be HP and man were they ever!

Pictures really can't explain just how much flooding there was, this is only one field in one place, but this kind of flooding was happening all over! The farmers certainly need the rain but this kind of flash flooding can wash away seeds, small plants, kill sprouts by drowning them and the volume of water needs a good dry stretch to evaporate.

This shot was taken looking north-northeast towards the storm as it began to race east at around 120 km/h. Initially storm motion was around 60 km/h, but the cells closer to Grand Valley which I core punched consolidated and the whole cluster became a linear MCS. Had I stayed back and waited I would have been in a good position to intercept the storm near Orangeville, oh well! On a side note I had the opportunity to meet fellow storm chaser Andrew Colvin here, it was a pleasure to meet him! I just wish the storm was moving along at a Texas Panhandle style 9 knots, it would have given us more time to chit chat.

Here's the 2PM satellite / radar analysis, you can see the storm cluster is now really linear. It ended up dropping some 2cm hail in places along highway 9 near highway 400 and actually dropped a couple 3cm stones in Stouffville. Despite the core hitting near 70 dBz at times, there was little damage reported. Some tree branches came down in places, but the damage was so sporadic it could have been attributed to lightning without actually being inspected.

I eventually headed back home just to get hauled out again as the second wave of convection began to develop along the same boundary the first storms formed along.

I guess this is technically a shelf cloud, but it was really just a messy outflow feature. I like the town of Erin but the problem with Erin is that well... it's Erin and that means it's bordered by the Niagara escarpment on the east, hills to the north and Brampton to the south. The west is good as it opens up, but unfortunately unless storm motion is to the west, that does not leave me with much of an option for a east moving storm. Did I mention there are plenty of trees in Erin?

If you look towards the centre of the image you'll see what appears to be banding of the rain bands. Usually banded or striated rain curtains mean there is either hail mixed in, strong downdrafts mixed in pushing the rain outwards in sheets or a combination of both winds and hail. In certain situations if the rain bands are spinning around and encircling a wall cloud then you might have an indication of weak or strong rotation making it to the ground and the possibility that there is a tornado somewhere in the mix. Obviously, since I'm not under a wall cloud or any real major source of inflow, this was mainly going to be an outflow event and maybe even hail driven thing. So after I took this photo I re-positioned a little to take a direct hit.

This is what was going on as far as the meso-scale environment was concerned. The stationary boundary the first storms fired along was pushed south as it became an outflow boundary. The southerly flow persistent from the synoptic environment and clear skies south of the convection allowed daytime heating and surface winds to begin pushing the outflow boundary back north. This was essentially turning it from a stationary boundary, turned cold front back into a warm front type structure. The new storms which formed on the secondary trof/wave now rode this new boundary about 40 km south of where it previously lay earlier in the day. A secondary outflow boundary within the existing outflow plow is denoted as an occluded front. While convection was firing within the cold pool it was remaining highly elevated. The storm I was chasing near Erin was right in the notch of the warm/cold/trof intersection so it had an L shape with weak rotation right at the apex or triple point.

Well, I got blasted again with heavy rain and some small hail in the core but it was not overly crazy. So I baled south to get right into the area where some weak rotation was showing up.

Again after a brief lull I was blasted with winds and small hail, the wind was only hitting 60 something km/h and hardly severe!