Pennsylvania Thunderstorms Cause 86 MPH Winds
Severe thunderstorms ripped across the southern part of the state of Pennsylvania Friday, marking the third severe weather event of the season. The storms were forecast to, and contained, extremely high winds and formed under a Slight Risk and Severe Thunderstorm Watch. Below is a radar recap:
The Times Leader (Pittsburgh) says that over 100,000 lost power and there were minor injuries from falling trees. There were about 1,500 lightning strikes in the state, but the big story was the wind -- unusually high wind gusts, over hurricane force, were reported from official airport locations.
Latrobe, PA: 86 mph
Altoona, PA: 79 mph
Wheeling, WV: 71 mph
Millersville, PA: 70 mph (TV Meteorologist)
The southern half of the state was nearly covered in Warnings at some point through the event :
Plenty of wind damage was reported too, according to NWS Spotter reports, including a plane pushed into a fence at the Latrobe airport. You can read additional reports on the Facebook Group "Pennsylvania Storm Chasers." There were no NWS spotter reports of tornadoes or funnel clouds, and so far as I can tell, the NWS is not planning on doing Storm Surveys, talking only about straight-line winds, even though some newspaper accounts quoted "twisting". You can see photos of downed trees on KDKA's website.
I personally witnessed the first line of storms approach me at Skytop Mountain [Google Map] here in Centre County just outside of State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ. Here are some pictures taken there:
I was on the southern end of a storm that was associated with a Severe Thunderstorm Warning; the location is shown approximately at the "X" on the radar image below.
I didn't see any lightning and the gust front was ill-defined but the winds were high - I didn't have any equipment to measure them but I would estimate 50 mph gusts coming up the mountain. While filming the winds and clouds, a huge dust cloud arose from the valley below and drifted off to the east, as you can see in the video below (my new camera had a bit of trouble focusing).
Here are more highlights, shot from a different camera in my car:
And finally here is a timelapse from that camera:
Even before things got cranking, I took photos of a number of interesting storm clouds associated with showers earlier in the day, and some after the main line of storms came through:
