Big Lightning Storm in State College!
UPDATE: Here is a storm damage photo one of our meteorologists took from Mitch Avenue in Houserville.
UPDATE: Here's the video (the BIG strike is at the end). You can hear me on the phone with Local storm chaser Ron "R-Factor" Shawley.
Here's an annotated lightning map from LightningPlus showing the streets of Centre County and the location where the photo & video were taken. You'll hear two close strikes in the video, I have pointed those out as well. They were each about 0.35 miles (about 2,000 feet) from me according to Google Earth. The green square encloses an area containing 85 lightning strikes! Fortunately, I was aiming the camera in that direction!
A severe thunderstorm warning was issued just about the storm over the city, for an area just to my northeast, and downed trees and power lines were reported in downtown State College during the storm. The strike that I filmed was probably the positive strike in the woods west of Toftrees (as shown above).
I wasn't alone in seeing awesome lightning yesterday; here's an animation of the lightning in the Northeast yesterday courtesy our Premium site:
ORIGINAL POST: I was totally unprepared for what turned out to be a great "storm chase" tonight here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map]. Actually it wasn't a chase at all -- I couldn't beat the storm home after I dropped my daughter off at volleyball tryouts, so I pulled over at a nearby charter school to observe the storm from the parking lot. I only had one camera and it had just ran out of batteries as the gust front was passing over. But it turned out that the best part of the storm was the backside which contained frequent, strong lightning strikes that are rare for this area. In fact, I'd say it's been several years since we had a lightning storm as intense as this one pass through the city. Here's a capture from the video shortly before 4 PM:
Last summer I got lucky with this close lightning photo; So this one is called "Sometimes You Get Lucky II"
I believe that the strike shown above was a large Positive strike, one of the ones northwest of my location as shown on the lightning map below. You can download* a radar loop here; I'll add additional information and pictures Wednesday morning, and I'll point out some of the strikes in the video which I'll post as well.
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