Best of the Year (so far)

Today as I sat behind my computer up in Bradfield, I really didn't know what was going on outside. Leon was checking the radar as always, but I hadn't seen any radar, satellite, maps, soundings, read any discussions, or even looked out the window to observe the clouds. OK, I knew that we've been under a pretty stagnant upper level trough since earlier in the week, but that's about it.

Fast forward to 5pm today. Leon makes a rather smooth exit from BF (he had seen the radar and wanted to make it home dry!), without so much as hinting at me that there's any weather of interest going on. 10 minutes later, standing outside Emerson Hall, and seeing a moderate rain falling, I decided to park and wait it out. That's when the first thunderstorm moved in from the west. This one had a pretty steady moderate-heavy rain due to a training of individual cells developing on the backside. As this storm finally pushed east and the rain started letting up, I walked through the Ag quad just to see the most amazing of sights. Literally right overhead on campus, a new storm was taking shape. Strong vertical motions were visible near the cloud bases, and there were several cloud to ground lightning strikes that were within a mile--too close for comfort. I decided to make a dash for it--to try to run home to north campus while I had the chance. As I ran past MVR, the rain picked up. It became heavy as I hustled across the footbridge and then, all of a sudden, became torrential. There was shelter in the form of an overhang at the Noyes Lodge building. For the next 5 minutes or so, there was torrential rain mixed with dime sized hail. Once I got home, the heavy rain picked up again as yet another cell tracked over us from the west.

For once, it seems, we were the lucky ones. From looking at the radar, it seems as though what caused the strong t-storm to develop over us was a quick convergence of the line of cells that hit us first and some thunderstorms moving northeastward out of Chemung county. It is remarkable how fast this all happened--going frame-by-frame on the radar, we went from having ~25 dBz to 55-60 dBz in 4 minutes, and the intensity gradient on the backside was very sharp.

Sorry for the long post. Anyway, I hope you have a good weekend out there, whether you're reading from Fresno, Ithaca, or even Norman. We might check out the Ithaca Festival this weekend--there's gonna be music, hippies, and maybe even some crystal healing if we're lucky.

-Dean