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July 31, 1999 Storm Chase

Two days ago, I decided to have a look at the 48 hour 12Z Eta sounding. This sounding looked promising. Relative humidity was forecasted to be quite high, 88%, with a dew point of 23 C. Also, the lifted index was forecasted to reach –8.89 C, and the CAPE was said to be 3259 J/kg. Even though this was still two days ahead, I decided to just keep my eye on what happens. The next day, I looked at the 12 hour 12Z Eta sounding again. This time, the sounding variables and indices had changed, just like I thought it would. Relative humidity had reduced down to 60%, and the dew points were forecasted to be 19 C. The indices were much lower, but I figured that I should still keep my eye on this potentially severe storm system. A good chance of thunderstorms was probable for Saturday. Overnight, everyone was calling for a risk of heavy thunderstorms. So far, my forecasted was right. Saturday is going to be an active day.

The day started when my younger sister, Rita, woke me up, saying that there was a severe thunderstorm warning out, but she wasn’t sure where. It was about eight o’clock. I looked out the window, still laying in bed, and saw a darkening sky off to the west. So, I jumped out of bed. Then I heard thunder. I was starting to feel excited, and I quickly got dressed. I then went out on my porch. It was obvious that this storm was moving in fast; the thunder was getting much louder. It started to rain moderately when the phone rang. Uncle Dave was on the other end, and told me that we had a severe thunderstorm warning. We then started to discuss whether or not we should go out chasing. We decided to wait and see what this storm was going to be like. I went out on the porch again. After 15 minutes, the rain came down heavier, and the lightning became more intense. Talk about an alarm to wake you up in the morning! We should have alarms like this to get us up for school or work all the time! We knew of the severe weather starting during last minute’s notice. I decided to give uncle Dave a call back. I wanted to go chasing, but little did I know that the activity would be lasting all afternoon. It took him quite a while for him to arrive. Apparently, the traffic was slow, probably due to the high precipitation. Well, when he arrived at my house, the storm was pretty much over. He and I thought there was nothing much to that storm anyway, but decided to take a drive out and see if there were anymore storms developing. Uncle Dave, Rita, and I, including our "thunderstorm detector" , Sam, uncle Dave’s dog, headed out on regional road 86, but saw nothing. So, we decided to head back and wait for anything else to arrive. A while later, I saw some more TCU off to the north, so I decided to give Dave Patrick a call. He said that he was just north of Fergus, and was heading southwest, to the second cell. This whole system seemed to be disorganized, but storms were sure firing up all over the place. I gave uncle Dave another call, and both of us agreed to head out. On his way over, while driving on the express-way, he took videos of a nicely-shaped wall cloud. It looked like it was going to be one heck of a storm.

At 1:00 p.m., the three of us headed out on our second chase of the year. We went up towards Elmira, on highway 86, and headed west. We went through a small town, Wallenstein, when we started to encounter the rain. The rain came down heavier, and CG’s were darting from the sky frequently. We decided to take regional road 12, heading towards Arthur. We pulled off to the side of the road to watch the lightning for about 10 minutes. Uncle Dave made the attempt to take still pictures of lightning, while I took some videos. Some of these bolts were amazing to watch; some of them lasting a few seconds. After the show, we continued to head north. After we went through Parker, we heard that the severe thunderstorm warning was upgraded to a tornado warning for Wellington and Dufferin counties. That’s the area we were in too!

When we arrived at Arthur, we realized that our storm was now east of us, so pulled off of regional road 12 and took regional road 109, leading us straight into Dufferin county. The sky was quite dark ahead of us. At 2:10, I gave Dave Patrick a call. I told him of the tornado warning. I told him where we were, and he said he was south of us, near Fergus. Apparently, there was another storm developing southwest of us. Right after the latest storm moved out, the next storm moved in. Dave said that he was at the southwest end of the storm and could see massive development, and it looked like the tornado warning was issued because of this storm. I looked behind us, and saw the storm that Dave was talking about. This sky looked very dark. The storm moved in, and the rain came down heavy. A lot of lightning was flashing around us, and we pulled over to wait out the heavy rain. Luckily, the storm’s core just missed us off to the left. When it started to clear up a bit, we pulled over at 2:40. The cloud formations were starting to look more interesting. We thought that this was the area where we would see a wall cloud. None. There were only cloud fragments and scud. After waiting for a while, we decided to head to Arthur and take highway 6, heading towards Fergus at 3:00. We reached the Alma area within six minutes, and pulled onto regional road 17. I looked up ahead, to the west, and saw another storm! I gave Dave Patrick another call, and told him of this cell. He was near home, and was going to check out the radar. He called back a few minutes later, and said that there were two other bands of thunderstorms moving south of Waterloo. CAPES were estimated to be about 2050 J/kg, but conditions were starting to stabilize. We thought that the activity was pretty much over, and headed home. We got back at 3:50. The next day, I got word that a funnel was reported between Waterloo and Elmira.

Special thanks to Dave Patrick for providing us with the details regarding the storms.

Total hours: 2 hours 50 minutes

Distance: 120 km