Warning that I'm probably gonna ramble on for a bit here, but anyways:
Day started with those initial storms that I posted a photo of in my previous post. The lightning show, while cool, didn't last long and I didn't see any more strikes after about five minutes or so.
At around 11:15 I noticed some narrow rain shafts developing around me, like the one pictured here:
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What followed was a good 5 or 10 minutes of being soaked by one of the most torrential downpours I had seen for a long time. Oh yeah, my neighbors who had thought it was a good idea to throw a pool party during all this, abandoned their plans and went inside, which is probably what any sane person would do.
But not me!
Then the winds picked up, likely about 10 MPH sustained with gusts to around 20. The winds continued for the entire day and into the night.
My phone's battery was dying, and I had to make a phone call anyway, so I did mostly stay inside for about an hour when nothing of interest was happening. Of course I did have to periodically check to see if something would sneak up on me, but nothing did. By around 5 PM I figured nothing more was going to happen and began to settle down for the night.
That is, until about 7:30 that evening, when a potent storm cell developed directly to the south of me, and was making a direct northern beeline. What followed was an hour and a half of the most intense lightning show I have ever seen in my life. I lost count of how many strikes I saw, and I got many of them on film. Some of the ones I did get on film included one that knocked out power to buildings near the 15, and a nearby one that knocked out power to my town (we have a backup battery fortunately, so we did not lose power but some of our neighbors who don't have generators did). That one was interesting because there was a visible power flash after the strike itself, probably the transformer on the line blowing up. The storm also produced three more torrential downpours like the one I encountered in the morning.
Still haven't decided if I'm going to post the footage to my embarrasingly crappy YouTube channel or somewhere else.
Some screenshots from the footage I took showcase some of my best lightning shots to date.
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My weather station recorded a peak gust of 23 MPH during all this, so these storms didn't quite cross the severe threshold, but for a community that gets excited to see heavy rain and snow flurries, this was an awesome experience for me. This was also probably the closest I'll get to seeing actual "tornado weather" while I live here, unless a landspout decides to sneak up on me, perhaps during a day not dissimilar to this one.
So, that's my June 22 home storm chase log!
