Recap of July 26, 2010

All the ingredients were there, although the low-level shear was a little on the weak side. We targeted Carman, MB.

On the way to Carman we saw a storm try to go up west of us, but it really struggled against the cap and it was really neat to see the storm die from the bottom up.

We got to Carman and ate, got into the car and waited.

And waited and waited and waited.

An area of persistent cumuli was just west of us, not really moving. This had to be the place.

And waited and waited and waited.

The towers got more vigourous as we waited there, sometimes sending up more serious pulses:



But they didn't last long, as they were pretty thin and were obviously not breaking the cap. There was, however, one persistent tower that was much wider at its base:



Then it happened. The cap broke. I was telling the PASPC what I was seeing and, while I was on the phone with them, a new RADAR scan came in and confirmed what I was seeing: the storm was becoming severe.

It looked like a multicell line for a while, so we knew that it would require a bit of time to become organized. So we decided to go ... uh ... in search of frozen precipitation. (I know, don't do that.)

We got some twoonie-sized hail near Oakville, drove to Elie and bombed south through some quarter-sized hail. We came out the other side to see a pretty nice wall cloud. If it was rotating at all it wasn't very quick rotation. A scud tag out the bottom of it may have fooled some people into thinking that it was a funnel and, indeed, one was reported. (Not by us.) This picture is taken after the scud tag dissipated:



The storm had taken a hard right turn and so we had to stay ahead of it. Unfortunately, the road network there is conducive to going pretty much any direction except southeast. But we did happen to make it southeast of the storm, but not before going through some golf ball to baseball hail. I was scared, at least a little bit, that I would lose a windshield, but there weren't too many of them.

Once we got there, though, it was clear that it wasn't going to produce. We stayed back and got some nice pictures:





By the way, I will have the RADAR and satellite pictures from this event on Weather Central hopefully soon, like within a week. The lead meteorologist said he didn't issue a tornado warning for it only because he knew we were on the storm. Having looked at the RADAR I can understand.