Second Severe Weather Season Hits Central PA

I've blogged before about how severe weather season in Central Pennsylvania really only lasts from May to August, with a spike in early August and one more at the end. Then, it's over. Some refer to this as the "second" or "secondary" severe weather season (not to be confused with the U.S. Second Severe Weather Season which occurs later in the Fall).

In any case, the last few days have been a little crazy here. Sunday night, a surprise storm formed right over the top of State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map] (we are just north of Pine Grove Mills on the radar loop (download hi-res).

It then merged with an incoming line of storms, and a circulation formed between my and Henry's house! I was about to run out to the car to videotape the lightning to my northwest when we noticed the interesting clouds between us so instead I taped this from the back porch:

The video above concentrates on the inflow and/or updraft of the storm which formed fog on the mountain before our eyes, then started sucking it up. There were some possible eddies of rotation within this as well (note at one point, foreground clouds are moving right, while background clouds are moving left). In the Raw portion, you can hear Henry and I discussing the storm over the phone. There were all kinds of tubular, vertical, and tornadic-looking clouds, but no rapid rotation.

Moments after this video was taken, I realized my main camera was running out of batteries (rookie storm chasing mistake!) and was struggling to get my older video camera recording, when I observed a large lightning strike to my south. I thought "wow that must have been near Henry's house" and in fact, I found out the next morning that it had decimated a tree a couple hundred yards behind his house! Here's footage of the damage:

High-resolution photos are available on my Facebook page. The damage was incredible; shards of the tree were thrown an estimated 70 feet away, with some stuck into the ground. This is one of the reasons you don't want to stand under a lone tree during a thunderstorm!

Here's the strike that did it, according to AccuWeather.com RadarPlus and the U.S. Precision Lightning Network. As you can see from the larger view, the storm dropped hundreds of strikes in Centre County - very impressive for any time of year here. It's a shame I couldn't videotape it.

Then yesterday (Monday), a small storm developed north of AccuWeather HQ and approached with a nice-looking gust front and lots of lightning (unfortunately most of it was on the other side of the rain, as you can see from the radar loop download hi-res -- AccuWeather HQ is the 2nd "X" from the top).

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