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A Missed Wall Cloud in State College!

By Jesse Ferrell, AccuWeather meteorologist

Published May 11, 2007 11:52 AM EDT | Updated May 12, 2007 12:23 PM EDT

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I was coming home from picking up my daughter at school yesterday on Route 45 around 3:20 PM local time and spotted what I thought was a wet microburst, but was actually a wall cloud from a thunderstom, to my west. I was travelling at 55 mph at the time so I didn't stop -- it went behind the trees and by the time I got out of the dip in the road, it was gone. You'll have to trust me when I say it looked like this one shot in Texas from K5KJ (a real storm chaser). Here's the radar image:

WALL CLOUD IS NW OF "X"; I AM AT "X" NEAR PINE GROVE MILLS - DOWNLOAD LOOP

I regret not immediately stopping to snap a pic, but I always forget how quickly the clouds can change, and I always think that I can get to a spot with better visibility. Chasing here in the East is tough and it's typically just a sky filled with tall trees and power lines that you get to point your camera at. If my daughter hadn't been with me I might have careened off the road into a field to grab the camera -- but she's been through enough of my storm chasing hijinx. Still, I am disappointed as I've seen few, if any wall clouds in my 10 years living here. I took a few other photos of interesting clouds, including a possible wall cloud:

MY LATEST PHOTOS FROM IN OUR PHOTO GALLERY (PERMALINK TO THIS DAY'S PHOTOS):

As I said, I thought it was a wet microburst because it was almost completely round, but those are very rare to photograph -- I have captured two in my life, but I don't have the pictures handy. Here's an example from StormEffects.com. By the time I was able to see it again in between trees, it had broken up into several separate appendages, indicating that it was a wall cloud. I called Henry (PREMIUM | PRO), who was still at AccuWeather, but he was unable to see it from his location (again, the dang trees). He did take this video from AccuWeather HQ, showing some lightning and a possible hail shaft in the storm, while he was talking to me on the phone:

VIDEO BY METEO MADNESS MAN (PREMIUM | PRO)

Here is the Storm-Relative Velocity shot, which as I've said, can be really hard to pick up rotation when you're near the radar's center due to clutter, but I'm confident that the green pixels next to orange pixels (showing rotation) indicated the short-lived, miniature wall cloud.

WALL CLOUD IS NW OF "X"; I AM AT "X" NEAR PINE GROVE MILLS - DOWNLOAD LOOP

However, only one warning was issued, for the eastern part of Centre county that hour, so if it was rotating, the local NWS office didn't believe the radar scope, because they didn't warn on it.

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WeatherMatrix
Jesse Ferrell
AccuWeather Meteorologist and Social Media Manager Jesse Ferrell covers extreme weather and the intersection of meteorology and social media.
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