Posts Tagged: rain
June 8th 2015
On June 11, 2015
- 2015 Storm Chases
This was one of those somewhat unusual setups where storms were poised to fire along a trough from a secondary low behind a weak cold front. The initial cold front brought weak storms and drenching rains overnight and into the morning.
The day started with dense cloud cover and dreary showers. Despite the washed out morning conditions, clearing and warm air advection began to ejected energy from Michigan northeast into western portions of Southwestern Ontario. The lingering cloud cover also began to clear from west to east. The environmental conditions quickly began to become favorable for storms and some weak convection initiated in Michigan.
A few storms began to form over central Michigan and track towards the border. I decided that it looked decent enough to head out and traveled west towards Exeter.
I took a few minutes to stop and visit the Exeter Radar Site since it was literally along the way into town.
Just west of the radar site the skies began to clear and the extent of the deep rich low level moisture became apparent and thick super low level cumulus started to form. You can see how wet the ground is from the storms the previous day and the early morning rainfall.
I stopped in Exeter, grabbed some A&W for lunch then headed north. While I could hear thunder an incredible amount of haze had fomented itself around me. Just north of my local two discrete cells popped up as the nose of warm air from Michigan began to break through the cooler air from the morning.
This was the first storm to my west. I could see very little structure due to the haze and cloud. I sat and watched before I eventually decided to travel south.
The storm soon appeared to look more organized and I could see core structure as well as outflow features.
This pile of scud looked like a wall cloud briefly but it was most likely an outflow only feature.
As the storm drew nearer it has a pretty solid looking core and a ton of outflow wind. Unfortunately I could not see any solid inflow structure to the southwest which sort of worried me.
I stayed right on the edge of the storm but it was just chugging along at a good clip and dumping tons of rain and outflow crap in its wake. I eventually met up with fellow chasers Scott Burlovich and David Piano and we regrouped to head west towards another storm.
As we headed towards another storm this was a neat shot looking back at the first cell. You can see the core of the storm to the immediate top of the photo (north) and the whales mouth to the right (east). This entire whales mouth feature was a massive outflow boundary that was slowly pushing south away from the parent storm.
As we got closer to the second storm which we had targeted it began to fall behind the outflow boundary from the first storm. As this happened it was apparent that there was little structure and likely no surface inflow. This was a half hearted attempted at a shelf cloud.
Eventually we fell south and a new weaker cell began to form ahead of the outflow washed storm. In littler three radar scans it jumped from a weak rainy storm to something more impressive little. As we punched through the storm and wound up on the northwestern flak we had a good clear view of a nice flanking line and good inflow structure.
This storm had now managed to meet up with that big outflow boundary and started to pull in warmer air south of the cold pool at the surface.
I took the opportunity to grab a photo of Scott while he photographed the storm.
We fell south with the storm and I quickly noticed some crazy spin in the cloud directly ahead of us. We both stopped and started taking photos and video. I can't explain it with still photos, but the rotation was very pronounced.
This was the inflow/outflow part of the storm where had there been a tornado, it would have been located.
Again, the outflow began to get ahead of the parent storm and trigger a cool whales mouth. By this time the visible rotation had diminished.
This was the area where new towers were growing but not precipitating. These clouds were super low!
Eventually everything just became a big pool of outflow and fresh storms failed to really successfully fire while whatever was on radar quickly fell apart. Getting out south ahead of the outflow the air was 26C and it was hazy and humid.
I noticed on radar a new storm had started to brew to our northwest but visually we could not see much of anything. I suggested to Scott we head in its direction and once we were about 4 km out we stopped and had this interesting view!
The storm was unusually laminar looking with mid level inflow present. It's unusual to see this type of structure in Southern Ontario so I was very enthused!
I had to grab the Fisheye lens, this storm had such a cool look to it! Despite being very laminar it had no rotation that I could see, at least not on a ground relative level but mid-level inflow banding was very very present.
This wall of cloud which almost had a roll cloud look was just to the southwest of the main storms core region.
Interesting to note is that the storm had this beaver tail like feature. Again, this storm was hauling in mid level and low level inflow so it makes perfect sense to see moisture just streaming in from the southeast.
The edge of the storms core was just coming across the trees in distance. I figured this was a cool photo and I only had about 30 second after taking it before the rain hit.
Eventually Scott and I fell back southeast and punched through the storms core. It was very underwhelming but it was fun to watch Scott try and fight with the rain to photograph some crepuscular rays breaking through the rain.
I waited for a bit and watched some lightning trickle out of the storm with Scott. It was nothing that would be easy to photograph so I called it a night and headed home parting ways with Scott.
May 30th 2015
On May 30, 2015
- 2015 Storm Chases
The models two days prior had already indicated that today was going to be a long chase day with a slow moving cold front and pre-frontal trough sparking off convection as it crept into a warm southwesterly wind field. By 11AM storms had already started to quickly form and by midday the action was in full swing.
So I had to fix my computer. Long story short, it was in the shop for a week, I needed a new motherboard and the part finally came in from Montreal. Perfect! I raced up to Canada Computers to drop the board off for installation before the storms started.
That was the plan anyway, I was barely out the door when cells started to go up to my immediate west and the chase was sort of on.
The storms. still a distance away were part of a surface wave that was tracking east from Lake Huron. I was watching this feature on the visible satellite image and ironically it began to balloon into something while I was trying to do the whole run to the computer store thing.
As I headed northwest to intercept the first cluster of storms for the day some low hanging structure came into view.
I pulled into an empty school which gave me a good clear view of the sky. This feature was both an outflow and partial inflow feature. If it was curving the other way it would be a bonafide wall cloud.
The storm on radar was beginning to look a little more intense than it had before and a stronger core was growing.
When you see these types of scuddy things right on the edge of a strong storm core usually it means a notch of some sort is forming and it also means there's a lot of pushing and pulling between air trying to get out of the storm and air being forced into the storm.
You can see where the storms forward flank meets with the main updraft and to the far left of the screen your also seeing a little bit of the rear flank with outflow scud.
I quickly raced into a better "I'm getting cored" position and shot some video. Photos just don't do strong cores justice, you need video! I clocked winds of 96 km/h briefly.
Here's the core as seen through the GoPro.
This was taken just as I was about to cored, you can see how there a bit of a notch like thing on the BREF. Basically it's warm air curling around and trying to feed into the storm. The SREF numbers were low, almost zero, but still a typical notch like echo for Southern Ontario.
I kept with the storm for a little while but it was moving into an increasingly urban area and already outflow was undercutting the warm southwesterly surface flow. Basically, any other storm in this area would have likely been elevated.
I decided to head west and intercept storms as they went up along the frontal / outflow boundary. It was the best option since I could pick and choose storms easily and most of them were growing in fresh unstable boundary layer conditions not yet having been contaminated by outflow cooled air. Just as I was gassing up one storm unloaded its core and I was just soaked while hiding behind the gas pump attempting to fill up my car!
I'll ignore the gas station cell, while wet, it was on the "cool" side of the boundary. This storm near Campbellville tried for a little while to get organized but eventually just blew out as it cut itself off from the warmer air.
Just as the first storm appeared to be dying a second cell on that storms outflow went up on the warm side of the boundary and merged into this blob like thing on radar.
This was a little puzzling... this deck of scud was under the updraft, exhibited some upward motion but was pretty lame otherwise.
It looks like there is a shelf trying to form which indicates outflow yet there is evidence that the scud is also being drawn in from the storm rain cooled core?
This area had scud rising very rapidly. It was quickly condensing and becoming attached to the cloud base but there was zero rotation.
I eventually found myself underneath whatever this cloud structure was. It was very low and moving against the storms outflow. This only became apparent once directly underneath.
I was finally able to get southwest of the storm and it began to look more like an inflow structure or a very simple want to wall-cloud look alike thing.
This storm still puzzles me, I don't want to call this a wall cloud but it was clear that the storm was ingesting its own moisture as you can see scud feeding into this structure from left to right. This storm eventually move into terrible terrain and I headed west.
This was going to be storm number three in the line. It was a stronger cell that was just on the edge of the cold outflow boundary and looked okay on radar. Fellow chaser Ryan Dobbie was not too far away in Embro and we hooked up.
The Embro storm which was now just north of Woodstock had some amazing low level inflow that was going straight in and the scud was just going right up. Unfortunately, it began to go linear and again outflow started to undercut the inflow.
This area for a little while had me interested but it eventually fell apart.
Here you can see how the storm core started to re-develop just to our northeast and the storm has now become really linear.
Despite the outflow undercutting the storm at the surface, aloft, maybe 300 meters or more above the ground there was fast moving inflow. Enough to keep the storm alive but not enough to keep it surface based.
Ryan and I headed back south to intercept the nose of a bowing squall segment which had migrated all the way from central Michigan. Unfortunately this feature was propagating through the prior storms outflow which diminished its intensity.
A little notch like feature (with no base velocity) formed just to our northwest and raced up to catch it.
You can see how the storm looks at the surface relative to the radar.
The tip of the bow so to speak was that piece just crossing the road in the distance and the notch (if you want to call it that) is just to the left in the rainy area.
After intercepting the squall line which was storm 4 we headed south in the hopes that something else could get going in the warm air. A little storm did try to go up but I suppose the stable marine layer from Lake Erie was just not favorable.
I was surprised to see this beast of a chase vehicle. It is pretty slick!
Ryan posing for the camera with his dodge and the "canwarn spotter" lettering. It was a fun day and it was nice to meet Ryan and his brother out in the field (haven't seem for a few months).