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7-10-08
This turned out to be a pretty interesting day. Helicity was actually pretty decent today along with some pretty decent instability (3000 jk/g CAPE). Talked to Joel on the phone and he brought to my attention a halfway decent looking tower basically right above me. I stepped outside to have a quick look and it was spitting a few small drops of rain, but that was it. As it drifted off to the east, the updraft plume was actually very impressive. It really looked like a halfway powerful updraft with visual bulding on the western portion. I wasn't doing anythying anyway, so I decided to go out to try and timelapse the thing. My original intention was to drive away from it and shoot the updraft from a distance just to pass some time. But, instead I drove east toward it, eventually through some pretty heavy rain, toward Sand Road in Erie, where most of my time has been spent recently. As I approached, there was Joel already starting his timelapse. But by the time I got there the base was already a tad too close and my video camera has ZERO wide angle capabilities, so I'm sure the video isn't anything special.
I'm starting off with a shot Joel took just to show what the base originally looked like when I pulled up to it. If I had only known what it was going to do i would have done something, anything to timelapse it.
This is when I started to take pics. I realy wish I would have started sooner. This had to be about 10 minutes after the first one was taken. It originally appeared to be some type of scud, but it had inflow characteristics. The northern side now had a pretty definitive inflow tail and showed some fairly nice banding. This was pretty freaking cool looking. This feature would eventually attach itself to the base. We've never seen anything like that before. If anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it.
A few minutes later.
To the right is the inflow tail. This thing went from being sort of pathetic looking to a classic storm in about 1/2 hour. It was also a totally rain-free base, which was even more interesting.
Yep, really need a new photo stitch program. This tail was actually much longer than this panorama shows. This was done through Photoshop Elements 4.0. It NEVER does a good job, as you can see. In fact, this is actually one of the better ones the program has done, believe it or not.
So after watching our storm drift off to the east for another 1/2 hour or so, we decided to go after it to see what it was doing. We could see the rock hard tower with it on the way there, but an approaching line coming in from the NNW was about to gobble it up. A bit before driving through Lyndon, we pulled off on a tiny back road to get a few shots. Around this time tornado sirens started going off, but I still don't know why. Unless I missed something, I didn't see anything tornado warnings in the lapsed radar loop when I got home, but I'm sure I'm wrong.
After hearing the sirens, we booked a little bit north to have a better look at the base. There were a few lowerings, but definitely nothing to keep an eye on. So, the "chase", if you want to call it that, was called off. On the way back home, I decided to once again stop on Sand Road to get some lightning coming in from the north. This was the line that swallowed up our storm.
This was pretty cool and all, but things were about to get......................................interesting?
The meso being lit up by lightning.
As you can see, most of the lightning is taking place miles away, although it IS coming toward me. Behind me, to my south, was literally NOTHING but high based clouds. I'm sure the anvil had to have been somewhere close, but the clouds completely covered any view of it. To my west quite a bit in the distance was a new rain shaft with a few flashes here and there. As my tripod is on up, shutter locked in the up position, with my hands in my pocket, I swivel around and for some reason look up at the clouds above me. KEEEEEERACK!!!!!! I literally see a leader coming straight at me. Where the actual bolt hit I don't know, but it was DAMN close. WAY too close for comfort. So this next shot you can see me grabbing the tripod and booking toward the truck as the shutter is still locked open. The light green streak on the right is a lightning bug, and the other glow is from my dome light which was left on for some reason. This happend about 10 seconds into a 30 second exposure, so whatever light the sensor picks up while left open it'll record onto the card.
Sure, I look back and laugh at this now, but this was NOT funny at the time. I don't think I ever shook so bad in my life. It was by far the closest I have ever been to a bolt of lightning, and I was standing out in the middle of the open. Lightning is nothing to mess around with, and I now know why. Normally I'd shoot from my window mount, but the wind was ripping to the north and any long exposure shot from the window mount would have been toast due to the rocking of the truck. My new Manfrotto tripod did a HELL of a job in this wind. At full size I really can't see any signs of camera shake.