A Little Bit of Action

Last night, we knew there was a potential for severe wx today. The setup didn't look too eye popping, but in general, we knew that with decent amounts of CAPE and shear ahead of an aproaching cold front, there was a distinct risk. Not yet having internet access in our co-op room, we weren't looking at this situation too closely. This morning, I got on the downstairs computer (which has working internet) to find, shockingly, that the SPC had upgraded our risk today from slight to moderate! A couple hours later when we got into Bradfield, we were again surprised as we were put under a Tornado Watch along with northern NY and western New England. I questioned the logic of this move since our wind shear was looking mainly unidirectional, not favoring supercells.

What panned out today was, for us, a little disappointing. The SPC was correct in its outlining of the moderate risk zone today, as there were numerous reports of hail and wind damage in the storms. However, we found ourselves just a bit too far to the west of the main action. There were two main lines of storms that formed today. The first line was the one that did the most damage, feeding on the clear skies and best CAPEs off to our east. One cell popped up just about 10 miles to our northwest around noon, tracking east-northeast. It was responsible for some downed trees just to the east in Cortland county and nickel sized hail further on in Chenango county. We could see the leading edge of the outflow from Bradfield:



The second round of storms came as a line associated with the front this evening around 6. These storms weren't as potent as in the first line, but at least this time we took a direct hit... but still missed out on the brunt as it passed to our south. The good part of it all is that we can finally breathe again inside our sauna-like co-op house.

-Dean