6/29 Panoramas and a Timelapse Rainbow!
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A RAINBOW MOVE? Rainbows move along the landscape over time, as the angle of the sun changes, and they also appear/disappear as rain moves through them. Usually they aren't around long enough to record these features, but the one in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map] on June 29th, 2008 was, so I crunched a 20-minute time lapse down into 15 seconds for you (repeats three times):
I caught a similar long-lasting bow in October 2006. The rainbow might have started even earlier than I caught it. Because of the late time in the day, the ends of the rainbow were nearly straight up and down. The rainbow included supernumeraries [Atmospheric Optics]. I took one of the photos and exaggerated the colors so you can better see them - look below the rainbow for a second and third repeat of the spectrum.
It lasted so long, I had plenty of time to take pictures... with my house...
...with the Davis weather station... with my daughter and her friend...
...I was running out of ideas! Here's a panorama from my back porch...
All in all, June 29th was just a crazy storm day here. Having it be a Sunday, where my schedule was free, was even better. Meteo Madness Man (PREMIUM | PRO) and I were out pursuing the storms between 1 PM and darkfall, and got some great shots. Previously I had brought you a "best of" edition showing the five best photos I took that day. Today I bring you more details on the storms, along with panoramas and timelapse videos.
FROM AccuWeather.com RadarPlus
Around 1PM, storms started to "run the ridge" in the western part of Centre County, and almost immediately became severe, with rotation on radar and mesos or wall clouds on the ground, from our view. Seven to eight storms followed throughout the afternoon and evening. The first three were similar, and most of my photos are from the 2:30 (impressive meso/wall cloud) and the 5:30 storm (impressive scud / arcus cloud). Severe Thunderstorm Warning was issued from 2:20-3:15 with the first storm, because of rotation on radar, and there was another for 3:30-4:45. Why the 5:30 storm wasn't warned on, I have no clue. It was very impressive from the ground.
Below is the best part of a longer timelapse from the 5:30 storm that I am posting to the Photo Gallery (I also got one from the 2:30 storm).
The new The StarDot NetCam AccuCam got an incredible timelapse of the 5:30 storm (it has a semi-live display inside the AccuWeather Network, so I used Camtasia Studio Pro 5 to record the screen and increase the speed (by 1000% then 500%). A low-res version is below - if you have the bandwidth, download out the high-res (12 MB) video here.
One of the weird things was the lack of cloud-to-ground lightning in the storms, especially considering they contained rotation and caused Severe Thunderstorm Warnings. This was compared to storms the day before, and compared to other storms to our northeast and south (click here for a 2-hour lightning map from 5:15 pm). Many severe thunderstorm warnings went up in the Northeast that day, but there was almost no lightning in them. A later investigation I did showed high freezing levels (around 13,000 feet) and low thunderstorm tops (mostly under 20,000 feet). One of the things I learned in my recent lightning seminar was that thunderstorms need to have ice crystals in their tops to create an uneven charge with graupel (hail). During the middle of the summer, that means that they need to grow pretty tall, definitely higher than they were today.
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