Incredible October Thunderstorms in Pennsylvania
I had a rare and unexpected opportunity to capture beautiful photos and videos yesterday right here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map]. Severe thunderstorms with thousands of lightning strikes swept the area, and I was able to position myself in the middle of the storms by successfully "chasing" to a storm vista south of town. Great storm cloud shots and a sunset were framed with fall foliage. You can see all my photos on our Photo Gallery.
The day started out with a severe thunderstorm around 3 PM which had some great clouds, including some eddy rotation right above me and a possible lowering wall cloud.
I observed the storm from Nixon Road in State College, shown as a "J" on this summary map and the "O" on the map above.
The "X" on the summary map represents the location of the roof damage, shown below, and there was also a large tree limb down across the road. I believe this location suffered this damage because there were no trees or structures to the northwest of the apartments - tracing the high wind area southeast I could not find any additional damage other than a large tree limb, although the NWS recorded a gust to 55 mph (at the "Wind" icon) and NWS Spotter reports indicated trees down in Houserville (the report downtown was bogus). A Severe Thunderstorm Warning was issued after the damage occurred. (No other warnings were issued with these storms because lightning was the main danger and that doesn't factor into warnings).
After I had documented the damage from that storm, additional thunderstorms were approaching from the west. I had wanted to visit "Indian Lookout" on Colerain Road in Spruce Creek, PA (map) all season but it would require a storm to pass between there and State College, and that hadn't happened much this season. The lookout has an incredible view from the top of the mountain from WSW to NE. Storms coming in from the west typically fall apart before they reach this area, so I was concerned that I might arrive after the half-hour drive to find a cloudless sky.
But not tonight - the storm that I had spied on radar half an hour earlier moving towards the vista - when Ron "R-Factor" Shawley recommended that I chase there - was still coming, and was accompanied by a beautiful sunset. I took over 300 photos and videos comprising 5 GB of disk space and I'm only beginning to look through the videos.
This storm represented a number of firsts for me which made for unique photo opportunities.
- I had never tried still photography of lightning at night.
- I had never observed a storm from the top of the mountain.
- I had never filmed a storm at this location.
- I had never filmed a thunderstorm with fall leaves on the trees.
- I had never photographed a sunset at the same time as lightning.
- I had never filmed the same lightning strikes as another local photographer.
- I had never filmed a thunderstorm next to the moon.
That's a lot of new items for one evening. The moon shots didn't quite work out because the moon was a little too far west, but it was close. Forty miles to the west, Ron was facing east, towards me, snapping lightning pictures and video, while I was facing west towards him. We undoubtedly took pictures of some of the same strikes. As you can see from the strike map above, there were plenty to go around!
Here's a sample of what I saw that evening (YouTube | Download):
The best lightning strikes that I got on still frames (this is a 16-second exposure) were from the 7:00 storm (though I got more pictures with the 9:00 storm too). This photo was shot out the windshield from my camera on my dashboard. shows three strikes, approximately 1.5, 3 and 5 miles away from me. I had 3-4 strikes that I believe were withing 1000 feet, but captured none on video.
Since this was my first experiment with long exposures (I had previously only shot video) I was pretty impressed with the results. The only problem that I had when it started raining hard was the camera wanted to focus on the windshield wipers, which blurred out some of the later strikes. I even had the forethought to leave a second video camera running in the car so I could get a new Facebook Profile Pic ;)
P.S.: I'm not done yet -- keep an eye out this week for additional panoramas and videos from these storms. Some of my photos made it into this AccuWeather.com video which talks about the storms elsewhere too:
