July 17, 2000
Storm Chase
To
start off, little did I know that we would be getting severe weather
that day. Within the past few days, severe weather was the rule for
Canada. On July 14th, a deadly F3 tornado struck Green Acres Park, Alberta,
near Pine Lake. It did a lot of damage to mobile homes, and killed 11
people, including a 2 year old from Brampton, Ontario. This was the
fourth deadliest tornado in Canadian history. On the same day, three
tornadoes struck southern Ontario. The first possible tornado hit Brampton
at 1:00 PM. A BBQ was lifted into the air and parts of a roof were blown
off. Wind gusts to 80 km/h were also reported. The next possible tornado
struck Maple around the same time as the Brampton tornado. Residents
reported to have seeing debris blowing into the air and a whistling
noise. The third tornado of the day struck Vaughan at 1:15 PM. A car
was flipped and some roofs were damaged. Many funnel clouds were also
sighted and hail as big as ping pong balls fell in Guelph. That early
afternoon, Waterloo had a thunderstorm and 1 cm hail fell. I made a
report to the Weather Office to let them know.
My chase day started
when the first severe thunderstorm watch was issued at 4:50 PM. This
caught me off-guard because little did I know we would see some more
activity. I quickly got myself together and started to monitor the situation.
I was looking at WeatherTAP's radar all afternoon watching cells fire
up and dissipate. This was an example of pop corn convection, in which
cells fire up rapidly and dissipate, and then new ones form. I found
it quite difficult to figure out where these storms would fire up, as
it was hard to forecast where convection will occur. I looked out the
window. TCU were starting to grow. After dinner, I decided to give my
uncle, Dave Szozda a call and discuss our potential chase. It turns
out, Environment Canada had issued a severe thunderstorm warning just
before dinnertime for parts of southern Ontario. Things were starting
to get interesting. The first tornado warning was issued around 6:00
PM for eastern Grey County and Simcoe County, and at 6:22, the severe
thunderstorm warning for Dufferin County and the Regional Municipality
of York was upgraded to a tornado warning. No reports of tornadoes were
yet received, but I knew that this would be a "tornado day".
According to Dave Sills, he could see on satellite, where the lake breeze
frontal boundaries lay. One ran from Long Point to the west of Hamilton
to the northeast of King City. Another boundary ran from around Erieau
to Cambridge. A few cells fired up along the Lake Huron frontal boundary
as well, but since the jet stream was overhead, the shear was too great
and the cells dissipated. Dave Szozda and I talked some more about the
storms and made our final decisions. We were going to head out and wait.
While I was waiting
for him to come over, I decided to watch the sky. I could not get onto
the Internet because my father needed to do something to the computer.
I saw some TCU off to the north and west, and at around 7:00, the sky
started to look dark. Is the storm already here? And where is Uncle
Dave?, I thought. I gave him another call to check to see if he was
on his way over. I heard a bit of thunder and it started to drizzle.
Shortly after, the "Storm Descender" showed up. I loaded my
gear into the van. We were on our way.
Dave Szozda, my
sister and I left at 7:10. Since the storms were just popping up almost
anywhere, we decided to head out and play the "waiting game".
As we were on Northfield Drive, a single stroke CG flashed severe times
off to the north. We headed north onto hiway 86, towards Elmira, and
proceeded west. We had encountered very very little drops near the beginning,
but that was all the precipitation we had. However, I was impressed
with some of the CG's that were darting down. We pulled off to the side
of the road, and waited... and waited....
I decided to pass
time by taking some photos of the storm that was now east of us. We
didn't see much interesting structures. CG's were darting down for a
brief time, and we heard a little bit of rumbles, while the sun from
the west beat down on me and the birds were chirping. Dave Szozda took
some videos of the lightning, while I was snapping pictures. A little
after 8:00, we decided that there was not much happening and we started
to slowly head back home. We pulled onto a small gravel road, to get
on top of a hill, which offered some good visibility around us. We noticed
some more TCU building off to the south. We started driving east on
hiway 86. By then, the TCU was looking more interesting, so we pulled
over and took some more photos. I tried to make my shots "artsy"
by placing a tree in the foreground with the storm in the background.
We stayed around for a little longer, but then proceeded on home. We
got back at 8:20.
All in all, we didn't
see much of anything that was severe, however we got nice cloud photos
and saw some neat CG's... and we finally did not have to worry about
the dreaded heavy precipitation core that we would encounter on all
our other chases. This was our shortest chase yet, but it was better
than nothing.
The next day, a
tornado, which touched down in the south end of Guelph at around 8:00
PM, has been confirmed as F2. It damaged homes, trees, power lines,
vehicles, and a church. Another tornado struck 15 km north-northeast
of Waterdown at 8:30. A resident took videos of the tornado.
Total hours: 1 hour
10 minutes
Distance: 35 km
