I've talked before about when severe weather season takes place here in Central Pennsylvania. While it typically runs May through August, there is a small pre-cursor to the season that normally falls in early April. It would appear that this year, that has moved into late April. In the past two weeks, we've had *four* days with severe thunderstorm warnings and spotter reports (shown below; I'm at the "X") here in the Keystone State, and the Pennsylvania Storm Chasers Facebook Group has been busy.

On April 10th, things got (as the kids say)... a little cray-cray. We had no fewer than *four* lines of storms move through State College between 3 and 11 PM (the RadarScope capture below shows me in-between the first and second lines at 4:50 PM; here is the radar from when I was in the first thunderstorm's warning area at 3:55 PM).

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Photos from both the early storms are shown below; some of the lightning pictures look weird because this was the first time I was experimenting with the Kodak Z990 HD video). Ron also got a killer 360-degree video of the storm as it came in.

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Arguably my favorite video capture was this one (no, that's not a tornado, just some scud cloud):

The second storm had an incredible gust front and shelf cloud, which I was able to make into a panorama with Panorama Maker 4 and bring out the details with Oloneo PhotoEngine:

On April 17th, we had some great storms roll in at night, but I didn't have my DSLR (the Canon Rebel XS from Fumfie.com) in focus. Grrr. I'm still going through the video to pull some stills though. On the 19th, we had a weak line of storms move over my house (video) with only 36-mph wind gusts, while Henry, just two miles to my south, got this crazy video:

And finally yesterday afternoon we had a strengthening line of severe thunderstorms roll over us. I got some great shots, but the storms weren't as beautiful as the ones on the 10th, and had very little lightning.

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This radar capture shows two bow echoes heading towards me. They essentially combined into a line of storms overhead as the Severe Thunderstorm Warning expanded over me.

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What I did get a chance to do was to break out my GoPro HERO3 Black edition, with 240-frames-per-second-video. Even without lightning, it was fun to test the slow-motion capabilities, but I'll leave that blog for another day. Ron also got a nice 360 panorama video of the gust front moving over him, down in Vinco, PA.

As is typical with the first local storm chases of the season, I was wholly unprepared. I don't know why I can't convince myself that doing a "dry run" in the late winter is a good idea. On the 10th, my GoPro HERO3 was uncharged, and had to film from a box in the passenger seat, where it could reach the power with its tiny USB cable. I also forgot my tripods and the battery charge was low on my other cameras.

On the 17th, as you can see I didn't test-focus my Canon earlier in the day, as I should have. I also missed a great time-lapse of a killer shelf cloud rolling in with the later storm. Then I went to bed, thinking that the storm was over, and more lightning sparked up to my south.

Yesterday, I was much better prepared, but still forgot a memory card for my Kodak Z990 which I was aiming to use for HD video during the storm. Now, there's a memory card in my backpack and I'm ready to roll again. My goal is still to see lightning on the GoPro @ 240fps, but for now I'll have to wait until the next storm.

I also have several potential time-lapses from these storms, and I'll add them to this blog when I have them online.

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