Central PA Severe T-Storm 6/8 Photos, Radar
Sunday, I showed you videos from Friday night's storms here in Central Pennsylvania. I'll repeat again what I said on that entry: This may have been the worst storm since I moved to State College 10 years ago. WJAC has videos of the tree damage here and here.
I didn't get a chance to take a lot of still photos of the clouds, which I regret, because there was so much lightning, I didn't want to stop the camera from taking the movies. One panorama, made from two photos, is shown below. You can see the curve of the gust front and the large rain shaft which Henry was looking at in his video.
You can view all my photos here, including individual lightning strikes captured from the Quicktime movies. To be honest, I didn't get a lot of high-quality lightning strikes this time, like during the last storm. There was a lot of lightning in this storm, to be sure, but it was distant as the gust front approached -- a lot of shots like this:
and became too severe too quickly to keep the camera outside. The best shots were later in the storm... this one was interesting:
Also later in the storm, a couple of interesting lightning strikes in which (even from the Quicktime movies, which have less frames than a video camera) several different strikes were visible within less than a second. I posted a video of this one yesterday, but in case you can't use the video player, here's an animated GIF. (Of course, I happened to be moving the camera at the time -- Murphy's Law).
Here's an interesting situation later in the storm, facing south, in which multiple strikes occur almost at once.
I got a few damage shots the next day. Henry and I were both surprised that there wasn't more damage, considering how severe the winds seemed from our eyewitness reports. Still, parts of the city were littered with branches, cut logs and sawdust... such as this location on Nittany Avenue, which was mentioned in the CDT article.
I could only find one tree down, on Westerly, also mentioned in the CDT article. It was unclear where the lines went down causing the power outages.
Be sure to check out storm chaser and blog reader Ron's photos -- he got a couple lightning shots and also a lot of damage pictures, including these pics of damage to America's oldest strand of Elm trees.
As far as radar images and movies from the storm... this is about what the storm looked like approaching my location while I was taking the videos and photos (I am at the "X" above "Pine Grove Mills):
If you look at the storm to my west labeled "K3," referencing the storm table, it's tagged as 63 dBZ, which is pretty high by Eastern storm standards, but, like most of the other storms, no hail or rotation. This storm was all about the wind. Storm "O9" was a hail producer, shown as 68 dBZ with hail over 1.5 inches in diameter.
- STORM-RELATIVE VELOCITY FOR IMAGE ABOVE
- STORM-RELATIVE VELOCITY FOR IMAGE ABOVE (ZOOM)
- VELOCITY FOR IMAGE ABOVE
- VELOCITY FOR IMAGE ABOVE (ZOOM)
- RADAR FOR RON'S STORM IN JOHNSTOWN
Note also in Ron's radar animation -- he was near the tip of the bow echo that developed out of several storms -- a good place to be if you're looking for high winds.
If you look at the storm reports, this idea of all-about-the-wind is confirmed. Pennsylvania and surrounding states are speckled with wind reports - a total of 288 wind and 58 hail reports were filed, but no tornadoes.
The NWS in State College has also posted a summary of the event, with additional radar images. They explain how a rear-inflow jet helped power the high winds in the storms.
They quote Johnstown as the highest wind gust from official stations. However, I had 50 mph at my house and The AccuWeather Weather Station had 47 mph. Frankly, I thought the gusts would be higher, but the highest winds really came in-between the two stations. More on that on my Google Map Storm Survey later today.
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