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August 9, 2000 Storm Chase

The day started when I logged on to the Internet early afternoon. It was a muggy, and hot, afternoon, and southwestern Ontario was once under the gun for severe weather. Many weather bulletins issued by Environment Canada sat in my email inbox from the night before. On August 8, thunderstorms boomed across southern Ontario. I quickly read the emails, then I came across a recent severe thunderstorm watch. It was issued for the extreme southwest, but I decided to check it out anyways. WeatherTAP's radar showed a cluster of thunderstorms developing over the Detroit and Windsor area, including southern Lake Huron. Another storm was off to the north, just about to cross out to Lake Huron. That one was a supercell. The severe thunderstorm watch was issued for part of my chase region, Huron and Perth counties. I was interested in the supercell, and I figured it would track east and arrive in Huron, Perth counties by early evening. I decided to keep checking radar all afternoon.

Later that afternoon, at 4:03 PM, the severe thunderstorm watch had been extended to include Waterloo-Wellington-Dufferin counties, and other areas, including Toronto. Things were heating up. I checked radar, and sure enough more storms were firing up, and the supercell was closer. Shortly after, a severe thunderstorm warning was issued for areas just south of Waterloo. I looked out the living room window and saw a dark sky off to the south. My Weather Radio picked up quite a bit of lightning static as well, so I knew that had to be the severe storm. Radar showed the storms skimming past Waterloo county. At 5:08, a tornado warning was issued for the London area. Reports of a tornado were called into EC.

The storms were morphing into different shapes rather quickly... they resembled giant amoebas taking over southwestern Ontario. However, by dinner time, radar showed no more action. The supercell I was tracking was loosing its punch and was tracking southeast. In fact, all the storms were tracking southeast. By this time, my hopes for a storm chase were down. All the activity was to the south of us.

Dave Szozda and I started chatting on the Internet via Yahoo! Messenger about the radar updates. We knew that we would have to call the chase off because there were no more signs of development. However, that all changed when I hit reload to refresh the radar image. A thunderstorm cell fired up rapidly just to the northeast of Waterloo! Yes, we have something now! I then received an email from Dave Sills. He said that there were rapidly developing thunderstorms created along an outflow boundary from the storms off to the south. And a few mesos were detected on the Exeter Doppler radar. Now, the chase was on! I kept refreshing the radar image and sure enough, the cell that I saw had grown into several cells. It was growing fast. Thank you outflow! Dave Szozda finally decided to come over so we could head out. I printed out a radar image of the storm, and grabbed my chase gear. I went outside and sure enough, there was the anvil almost overhead. The sky was dark off to the north, and small, single TCU fired up ahead of the storm. It was neat looking and I knew this storm would be good. Thunder kept rumbling non-stop. Radar showed that the storm was moving closer, and it was moving southeast fast. We had to catch this thing before it heads to the south. I waited for Dave to show up. 10 minutes went by. Where are you? Come on, get here!, I thought. There were some inner cloud lightning. He has to be here before it's the year 2020!, I thought to myself again.

Finally at 7:05, the van pulled up. I asked Rita if she wanted to come, but turned the offer down for the first time. There was no warning out for us, but I had a feeling we would see something. This storm had a meso. I loaded my gear in to the Storm Descender, and we took off at 7:10. The storm was moving closer. I mentioned to Dave that I was impressed with how quickly this storm had developed in a period of about a half hour. When we were on highway 86, we started to encounter rain. It then got heavy. Wow, this storm really developed in a short period of time!, I thought. The heavy rain lasted for several minutes, but then everything cleared. OK now what? There were quite a bit of scud clouds, but that was it. A turbulent sky and outflow-generated scud. Now, the storm didn't look like it would do much, but at least we were out of the precipitation! We drove around to see if we would encounter anything interesting. I kept my eyes on the sky. Nothing. We saw a few scud clouds that we kept our eye on, but they did nothing.

We then drove onto highway 17, southwest of Elmira. All of a sudden, Dave spotted something. He stopped, and turned the van around and pulled over. He pointed to a spot out over a field. I looked. Then my heart made a leap. What the heck is that?, I thought. Smoke. It looked something like smoke, but not quite. Fire smoke looks different. I saw a stream come from the ground up into the cloud base. And it didn't look like scud either. It was a thin stream. It was dark. Its sides were darker than the center. A wimpy tornado? Our first tornado? Could it be? I never noticed any rotation in the cloud base, but realized that some tornadoes are so weak that they will have a translucent funnel, no wall cloud or hardly any rotation in the base associated with them. It's as if the rotation started at the ground and moved up toward the cloud base. Then it dissipated. Gone. It had to be a wimpy tornado. We pondered about this encounter for the rest of the chase. This storm did have a meso, and we were at the rear end of the storm. We were in a spot where tornadoes usually occur. Dave said when he first saw it that it was a bit wider. Could it have been a wimpy tornado that briefly touched down and kicked up some debris in a field? Since I didn't know for sure, I was reluctant about calling it into CANWARN.

Still pondering about what we saw, we drove onto a back road to try and meet up with the storm again. We made a loop, and found ourselves back on highway 86, near St. Jacobs. By now, there was nothing left of the storm. On the way home, I saw a small roll cloud element and a partial rainbow at around 7:50. We arrived back home 5 minutes after. We drove an estimated total distance of 25 km. It was a short chase, but an interesting one at that.

I stood on my driveway watching the storm which had now moved more southeast. Wow. The setting sun illumined the storm and cased a pink-orange hue to the clouds. The partial rainbow was still there. I looked at the top of the storm and noticed it had an overshooting top. Perfect textbook example mammatus clouds were under the anvil, behind the storm. Everything had a beautiful hue to it and the overshooting top was pure white. I took several photos of the storm, and shortly after, Dave and I drove out on the highway to get a better view of the storm. We pulled into a parking lot and took some more stills and videos of the storm. It was just beautiful looking! I say it is a great way to end the chase... with a rainbow, and a beautiful looking distant storm. After that, we headed back home. Afterwards, Dave headed back to his house. On the way, he took some videos of amazing lightning darting from the storm.

The moral of the chase is just because there is no warning issued, it does not mean that you cannot chase. Storms can bring surprising things. You should also keep your eye out because tornadoes of any kind can come out of nowhere without much notice.

Note: The possible wimpy tornado we encountered will remain unconfirmed because we can't verify for sure if it was really a tornado. I have spoke with Dr. David Sills about our encounter, and he says it sounds like it was a landspout.

Total hours: 45 minutes

Distance: 25 km