Possible Tornado With Pennsylvania Severe Thunderstorms
UPDATE: WGAL.com says in a video that the NWS has issued a statement saying that "most of the damage was from 90-mph straight line winds but there was an EF-0 tornado embedded at the Thousand Trails campground. The NWS statement is available on their website.
While the Storm Prediction Center issued a "Slight Risk" for the entire state of Pennsylvania yesterday, there were only two notable thunderstorms, both in the southeast portion of the state during the late afternoon. The Pennsylvania Storm Chasers Facebook Group leaped into action documenting the storms with photos and video - all the media on this page was taken by them. Here's a look at the warnings and storm reports:
As you can see, tornado reports were received during the Severe Thunderstorm Warning, but not during the Tornado Warning. Such is Murphy's Law for storms. The storms were very intense on radar, at least 74.5 dBZ. Here is a radar loop (download):
The most impressive video I've seen was from Mike Brulo and contained close lightning, golf-ball sized hail and high winds that indicated he was inside a downburst or a tornado:
Ron Slater also said: "I was IN it outside at Hershey Park. NASTY wind and stinging marble size hail! My head is still stinging. We made it to the entrance to the park and got on the little tram to take us to the car and it hit! MAN did it hit. I thought the world was ending. I honestly thought the thing was going to flip over. Hail coming at us horizontally. Everyone just hunkered down and covered up. What a storm!"
You can see video of the damage at a nearby campground on the local TV station website. The National Weather Service will do storm surveys today to determine whether or not the damage was tornadic. The storms acted like, and looked like, Tornado Alley supercells. This shot of the cloud was taken by DJ Hoffman:
The storms dropped over 5,000 lightning strikes in two hours. You can see the tracks of the two cells clearly on that lightning chart:
PennLive has a photo of the possible tornado by Millersville University meteorology major Michael Charnick while driving on 322 in Dauphin county, but the photo is too low resolution to tell anything definitive (definitively tagging a funnel cloud in a still photo is extremely hard to do as I have mentioned before). Severe tree damage was reported all over the area; here is a shot from Derek Wanner:
Rainbows too? Why not. Photo by Wade Fulp:
