Radar, New Videos From Hurricane Henry

UPDATE: For those of you who asked why we call it Hurricane Henry, check out the (RAW!) version of the video that Henry's son took during the storm below. You can see Henry at left, on his phone, he was talking to me about a mile up the road (my video coming soon). More photos, videos and information will be added this week as time progresses. Friend me on Facebook for future updates.

HURRICANE HENRY: SEE PHOTOS OF THE LIGHTNING, HAIL & DAMAGE | SEE ALL PHOTOS | SEE ALL VIDEOS

Meteorologists at AccuWeather now agree that what I videotaped was a funnel cloud. It's only the third that I've witnessed, and the first near home (the other two were at the beach in North Carolina). I made a timelapse of the storm, the funnel cloud is barely visible in the lower right in this wide shot:

Henry saved off some high-res radar shots from the event. The radar shot during the video shows the storm at about 69 dBZ (very strong for our area) with around 71 dBZ after it passed over.

There was a large area showing chance of severe hail at 100% (up from a tiny area of 95% the scan before) and the maximum estimated hail size was about 2.45 inches in diameter (that's the radar's best case not-necessarily-ground estimate, I think the largest stone was probably 1.75", still extremely impressive by Pennsylvania standards). Despite the funnel cloud, the velocity radar showed little rotation.

Here are some additional videos that I shot, including an interview with Henry, and a large hail stone in his yard.

By the way, I investigated the close lightning strike Saturday by walking around in the bramble-y woods for two hours but could not find the tree that it hit. I also looked at the Vaisala lightning strike data but it was inconclusive. This one is going to require a longer investigation.

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