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
