Central PA T-Storm Timelapse, Panoramas
UPDATE: Here's a panorama photo of the swirling clouds approaching my house. I say again, this was a really scary storm, folks.
The storms dropped over an inch of rain - 0.70" in less than 15 minutes, which caused flash flooding on College Avenue in State College (video coming soon); below is a panorama of that and a graph of the rainfall from the weather station at my house.
Below (for our non-wireless users) is a timelapse video of the swirling clouds approaching my house during the unusually severe thunderstorm that we experienced on Saturday.
You can see this video, along with more raw and time-lapsed videos of clouds, wind and rain, on the Photo Gallery. I will upload panoramas later this evening. Who else saw the storm? Well, Local storm chaser Ron "R-Factor" Shawley got some lightning pics you should check out down near Johnstown, PA and Henry and his kids did some videos of the heavy rain, high winds and flash flooding too. But the new AccuCam (in testing) caught a couple of interesting shots shown below, including some interesting structure and scud clouds:
What Did I Learn During This Storm Observation?
Each time I observe or chase a local storm I ask myself this question. What could I have done better, to get more impressive photos or video? Since this was the first storm of the season, I was caught a little off guard, but not for the usual reasons. My cameras were charged up and I had extra batteries. My failures this time were mainly bad positioning.
I have to remember that storms don't usually come from the Southwest here and I can't get as lucky as I did with the massive storm that Ron and I observed from my back porch last July. From my house there's no good view to the West or North. Had I driven across to the other side of our development, I could have clearly seen the different parts of the clouds that appeared to possibly be rotating. In the video above, the houses are in the way and the structure of the storm is not clear. Of course, when in the car I don't have the advantage of getting the good video after the rain starts (sans windshield wipers or raindrops) that I did this time out of my garage.
I also won't make the mistake again of placing one of my tripods on the back porch as the gust front approaches. Either the wind itself, or the chairs on the porch, knocked the tripod and camera over, deleting the video that it had been taking. Bracing the tripod against the eastern side of the porch would have solved that problem.
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