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August 15, 2000 Storm Chase

The day was going to hold something interesting for the storm chaser, at least according to the forecast. However, making my nowcast for the evening was somewhat difficult. I spent the weekend at my aunt's place, who happens to have no Internet access at all, so all I had to rely on was The Weather Network. By the afternoon, a severe thunderstorm watch was issued for SW Ontario, however a capping inversion was in place. I made several phone calls to Dave Szozda, my uncle and partner, to see if anything was updated. Nothing. The sun continued to shine, and the atmosphere failed to show signs of convection. By the time dinner rolled around, I was starting to get my doubts of anything forming. This cap was holding strong, and only puny small cumuli floated above our heads. However, at 6:30 PM, an "explosion" in the sky occured. Is there going to be a chase? TCU started to move in from the west and before I knew it, they were all over the place. The cap finally broke! Dave and I talked on the phone once more and made our plans to chase. We figured that once the cap broke, storms would fire up. He noticed something developing around the London area on weatherTAP's radar. While waiting for Dave to come over to pick me and my sister, Rita, up, a TCU floated overhead and produced a heavy rainfall. Yes, I got wet, but I was starting to feel happy that the atmosphere was about to do something.

We left at 6:50 and stopped for some gas. We then made our decisions to take highway 401 down to the London area because Dave heard that other chasers were making that their target area. The cells Dave saw on radar were expected to intensify. As we continued to drive down 401, we waited for a warning to be issued. Nothing. We looked back over to where Kitchener was and saw the TCU that brought the rain... it looked pretty dark and more interesting than the other clouds around. Rats. And we were leaving it. I hoped that no warning would be issued for that cell because we were a fair distance from Kitchener. Along our way to the London area, we some hidden TCU due to the haze. And these TCU didn't look too great either. About an hour and a half later, we arrived at London. Now we were disappointed. All that driving to see nothing but distant TCU off in the haze. Just great. Gas was not cheap either. Just great, great, great. We waited around for a little while longer, but then decided to call it quits. It was starting to get late and we realized that this chase was going to be a bust. We spent another hour and a half driving back home. We arrived back at 9:30 PM and drove a total estimated distance of 250 km. Ouch.

Later that night, thunderstorms went through Kitchener-Waterloo and other areas of SW Ontario. A severe thunderstorm warning was issued for another county west of K-W. I spent that late evening watching lightning at my aunt's... thinking to myself that a capping inversion will either mean boom or bust.

Total hours: 3 hours 20 minutes

Distance: 250 km