With a “wedge front” boundary along the Blue Ridge mountains providing ~30 kts of deep layer shear and with surface-based CAPE near 1500 my interest was piqued when a broken line of storms fired over West Virginia and moved southeast. Initially I pushe…
Video of third storm on June 20th. This is a view of the western lowering/wallcloud sped up 8x. At the time I started the video this storm had almost no radar reflectivity so this activity came as quite a surprise when I approached close enough to see …
I wasn’t sure what yesterday would bring chase-wise (I never am!) but I actually chased three separate cells. Heading south toward Rocky Mount around 1:30 I came across a storm near Wirtz that had recently split. The left-hand split looked more energet…
Needing to be north of Charlottesville around lunchtime for family matters I knew that chasing was likely on the way home…especially since the Storm Prediction Center had issued a Slight Risk for much of the Virginia Piedmont as a cold front neared t…
I thought I had a decent chance at an encore to yesterday’s chase but such was not to be. After looking at the short range models, real-time parameters (3000+ SBCAPE), and reading the NWS Blacksburg forecast discussion – which referred to a likely 2 pm…
I had decided the parameters weren’t going to lead to chaseable storms on Monday June 16th so of course a number of strong and severe cells fired, leaving me regretting my decision. Thus when similar parameters looked likely for Tuesday I made sure I c…
I couldn’t bring myself to label this a “chase” as there was little of note that happened. Still, a convective line in my figurative back yard is hard to ignore so I didn’t. Heading out to a local hilltop spot I set up a live stream just because I coul…
YouTube finally finished processing a video I uploaded from our 11 June chase (the first storm). We had come close to the back edge of the storm and saw some tantalizing features that we finally determined to be scud. Still this short clip gives an ide…
The models indicated that Wednesday June 11th would be a busy day and boy were they right! I left home at 1:15 to head for Gretna to (a) pick up my son / chase partner and (b) position us to chase the first set of cells that were likely to go up in tha…
The short range models were insistent that convection would fire across southside Virginia this afternoon and they were right! I picked up my son in Gretna around 3 pm and we headed west of town and drove south on the Climax Road. We found an open fiel…
