June 26, 2002
Storm Chase
A special
weather statement was issued for Southern Ontario at 12:52 pm. Strong
thunderstorms where on tap for this afternoon. No severe thunderstorm
watch was issued, but figured I could try getting a chase in anyways.
There was a line of thunderstorms moving inland. Dave Szozda and I left
at 6:10 and headed north on hwy 86.
We pulled onto regional
road 17, and headed west. I noticed the storm off to the northwest,
and there was a very small "shelf cloud" leading the storm.
It looked fairly dark in behind. We saw a bunch of low level scud near
the rain core. We cut south and ended up on regional road 11. We eventually
ended up on some gravel road (sorry, can't recall if it was township
road 20S or township road 16S). The rain had started to get very heavy.
Visibility was less than 1 km. I tried getting the weather radio on
the scanner, but it would not come through. It was either the reception
was bad due to the heavy rain, or we were in a "dead zone".
We then ended up on township road 3W, met up with regional road 5, and
decided to start heading west again on Perth Road 56, after we realized
that we were going southeast, which we didn't really want to do. We
eventually ended up in the town of Topping, and decided to try heading
down towards Stratford. There was quite a bit of lightning activity.
We saw several CGs. On our way to Stratford, we could see the end of
the storm. When we arrived in Stratford, we thought we should catch
up to the storm again in Waterloo by taking Perth Line 43. I tried to
get some of the lightning on video but it was too sporadic to keep focused
on one area. One intense CG struck ahead of us. We got back home at
7:50.
I really didn't
fusy the lack of features with this storm, but I did like some of the
CGs that came out of it. I guess it was not bad considering no warnings
had been in place.
Total hours: 1 hour
40 minutes
Distance: 117 km
