Central PA Severe T-Storms 7/20
We had a decent line of severe thunderstorms come through State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map] Sunday afternoon. You can see my pics of the storm (and sunset afterwards) on the Photo Gallery:
I got a pretty cool time lapse movie out of the Accucam (download here)
which even shows some rotation in the storm (presumably, because of the location near the gust front, it was just a benign rotational eddie). ( But Elliot Abrams (PREMIUM | PRO)
got an even better timelapse, in fact one that shows that vertical appendage on the right much better. Scary stuff!
The wind was the most impressive part, here are the observed gusts on the AccuWeather Mesonet:
AccuWeather HQ: 57 mph* Walker Building: 46 mph Joe Bastardi: 42 mph KUNV: 38 mph Jesse Ferrell: 33 mph Elliot Abrams: 33 mph
Check out the temperature graph below - it fell from 90 to 70 in an hour, half of that in 15 minutes.
Local storm chaser Ron "R-Factor" Shawley also got some video (which he'll upload soon) of the chaos at a local event near Johnstown, PA when the winds hit. There was some lightning here but I don't think I caught anything on camera. The government had our local radar out for maintenance so we had to rely on Pittsburgh. Here's what the line approaching looked like as I was taking the pictures (I'll have a loop for you later today):
I have never felt that my anemometer was far enough above the roof to catch the true gusts, and yesterday's wind would have been interrupted by tall trees to my Northwest. I was on the other side of the trees filming the storm coming in, and let me tell you, it was more than 33 mph. I had my camera on a tripod braced against the car, but the wind hitting the side of the car (and a bad directional estimate by me) caused the tripod to hit the pavement, popping the top off the tripod and chipping the outside of the lens on my Kodak Z740.
By some miracle, the camera still works (testament to Kodak, I guess). Unfortunately, if the camera loses power, the movie is not written to the memory card, so I lost most of what would have been a cool time lapse of the gust front approaching.
*Anemometer at approx. 40 feet. All-time record (since ~2005?) is 60 mph on 12/16/07.
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