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June 14, 2004 Storm Chase

It was another active day in southern Ontario. Numerous severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado warnings were issued around the Perth-Waterloo-Wellington areas. No tornadoes had been confirmed or witnessed, but there were a few reports of funnel clouds around Elmira and a rotating wall cloud in Guelph during the afternoon.

I decided to try my hand at chasing these storms later in the evening, after my Uncle Dave Szozda got off from work. A few supercells were training, one forming right after the other in a line from Stratford towards Guelph. Cape values reached 2500 J/kg with lifted index up to -8 around Huron and Perth counties. The SPC day 1 outlook outlined a moderate risk for the Great Lakes region. A squall line stretching from north Lake Huron all the way to Ohio was moving into Ontario at around 70 km/h as well.

I gave Uncle Dave a call a few times, but no answer... he finally called back around 4:30 and we decided to chase. We were initially going to head after the squall line, because we would not meet up with the supercell just west of Waterloo in time. I hung up the phone and checked radar again, and noticed the supercell had dissipated. However, just before Uncle Dave got here to pick me, I noticed another supercell forming to the west of Waterloo and thought we would have our chance at that instead.

We left my house at 5:50 pm, and took our usual route, hwy 85 north towards west of Elmira. We noticed dark skies over the area, and then just before we turned to continue on hwy 85 west shortly before 6:00, Uncle Dave exclaimed "What's that?!". I quickly looked over to the west and noticed a classic, beautifully structured wall cloud! I grabbed the video camera and started filming. It had just incredible structure! The wall cloud was visibly rotating, and we could see rotation striations in the updraft of the storm, almost looking like a large barrel. It was classic! A few CGs and heavy rain followed the wall cloud in behind. I tried to call CANWARN, but unfortunately got a busy signal. We turned onto Township Road 23 and pulled over onto the side of the road, to take pictures and video. I stayed in the van and continued taking video of the rotating wall cloud. Low scud kept forming and rising real fast into the wall cloud. I noticed a tail started forming, but it didn't amount to much. I kept my eyes on the wall cloud. We decided to try calling CANWARN again, and finally got through. At this point, I realized we were getting too close to the wall cloud... it was headed straight for us! Once Uncle Dave hung up, we decided to head north as quick as we could. We were in a dangerous position, so we turned around to head north on hwy 85 to try to get out of the way. Once we moved a bit, I got out of the van and realized the wall cloud was still on top of us... but thankfully it did not decide to drop a tornado and started to dissipate from the outflow of the squall line right in behind. I took a bit of video of some more low scud and a rain foot in the distance.

At 6:15, the wall cloud was gone as soon as the torrential rain hit us. We pulled onto the side of the road to wait it out, but eventually gave up on the chase because there was not much else going on but heavy rain. We continued to head back to Waterloo and noticed some roads were starting to collect water from the heavy rain. We got back to my place at 6:40 pm. This was a brief but great chase!

Note: Driving close to rotating wall clouds can be very dangerous because a tornado could develop any minute, so I do not recommend you do that on your chase. We were just lucky no tornado dropped, or I would start calling myself Dorothy! Always plan escape routes on your chases.

Total hours: 50 minutes

Distance: 40 km