Central Pennsylvania Severe Thunderstorms April 27th

On the day of the historic tornado outbreak in the South last Wednesday, AccuWeather.com meteorologist Henry Margusity and I chased a thunderstorm that moved east of us here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map].

Observing from the S. Nixon Road Storm Vista, the storm had nice structure (for Central Pennsylvania, especially this time of year, our severe weather season is usually later) and some interesting scud and lowerings, including a possible wall cloud. When it was really cranking up it even had some striations (as you can see above in the photo, enhanced with HDR software). Here is a zoomed-in time lapse of the storm (see also zoomed out):

This is what it looked like on radar (we were south of the radar site "+" about half-way to the county border).

Soon after the photo above however, it lost power as it moved away, so Henry and I wrapped up the chase. Here's the "we're done" video:

There was little to no lightning in that afternoon storm, but later that night, I got a chance to try out my Canon Rebel XS from Fumfie.com for night-time lightning pictures.

The key thing that this camera does, vs. my Kodak, is that you can leave the shutter open for up to 30 seconds, or forever, with no processing time in-between shots. There wasn't a lot of close lightning that wasn't behind the rain, but I did manage to capture this strike and one other. Next time, I can tweak the settings and get even better pictures. Here's what the lightning map looked like from 10:30 PM to 12:30 AM (I was at the "X" looking northwest with the approximate field of view shown as the green arrow):

Here's the radar animation from that line, which caused two huge Severe Thunderstorm Warnings, one confusingly issued during the afternoon storm, then another later in the evening.