Alberta Foothills Weather

Nice day out there today to celebrate Canada’s 142nd birthday.
Sunny and 20 brought out the masses to all the events in the little bergs around here, starting with a good horde at the Dickson Mud bogs, and ending with a big crowd around the Red Deer river at Bower ponds for the fireworks display tonight.
Lovely show Red Deer, Thanks!
Hoping for some natural fireworks tomorrow… fingers crossed.

Wow, June is gone already? That was uneventful.
No summer-like storms, no rain, about a dozen frost warnings and no 30C for the first time I can remember.
July will be an improvement regardless what happens.

The past two days have been trying to act more summery, but it has been too cold and dry for anything to get going for real. Yesterday was a pretty nice setup in the neighborhood, if it had been 30C. Plenty of shear upstairs and a stiff southeast breeze got things churning out in the hills early in the afternoon, a few nice cells rolled in but the bases were two miles up and most of them could not keep going with the lack of juice at the surface. I drove around the countryside for 8 or so hours and 400km getting nice car washes in Sylvan Lake, south of Rimbey, and a real good wash in Red Deer to end the night, but that was about it. Nothing very photogenic until I was heading home from Rimbey and spied a nice lowering under a cell right over the house. From 30 miles away. By the time I got here, it was halfway to Pine Lake, so I headed off after it, but soon after I got east of the QE2 it started to evaporate.
A small patch of updraft base with a little bit of precip to it’s north that I had been ahead of on the way east now took over the show. As this little embedded cell approached the ridge east of Red Deer it started to form a wispy roll of cloud below the base. Within 5 minutes it was a thick roll and 15 minutes later it was a huge roll of lifting cloud attached in the middle to the base of a suddenly much larger storm. It got very angry east of Red Deer in the radar hills, which is not a nice place to get stuck in the dark, I stayed well back of the heavy lightning but still found some small hail and torrential rain in there.

Made it back to Red Deer just as the last active cell was moving in from the west, crackling with lightning. While heading to a fave spot to set up, some unfinished and unsigned road construction just about cost a tow job out of the ditch, and I missed the photo ops before the deluge hit again.

Saw many inches of rain through the day, but the dryline was two miles north of here. 16 drops yesterday and another 12 today don’t add up to a teaspoon. The lawns of Red Deer and Sylvan Lake must be happy, ours is not. It’s crispy.

Happy Canada Day everyone!

Mud bogs at Dickson - 1pm
Fireworks at dusk in Spruceview, Stettler, Eckville, Red Deer

Still waiting for something interesting to brew up around here stormwise. Still no rain.
Saturday was a beautiful day, with the southern half of Alberta under a sunny ridge. A perfect day for a drive down to Kananaskis country. We went in west of Okotoks and Turner Valley, out the Sheep River valley and back, then down to Longview and in the south end of the Kananaskis Valley to the TransCan.
Other than a bit of haze floating around from forest fires in BC, a person couldn’t have asked for better conditions for hiking around checking out all the beautiful scenery in there.

Watching for something to fire up tomorrow, hoping something will roll past and drop some moisture, the lawn is burning to a crisp!

Alberta’s first tornado of the season may have dropped late this afternoon in Provost. Or maybe Hanna.
Mostly squishy convection started early in the day over the foothills, much of it dying off before getting far out, but one cell riding the ridge south of Olds took off and kept going. I almost went after it as it was approaching the QE2, but it appeared to be falling apart on radar, so I let it go. A few scans later it roared back to life and headed off across the prairie.

After reportedly dropping a tornado around Hanna somewhere that took the roof off a barn, the storm carried on over the Coronation/Veteran area, then reportedly dropped another tornado west of Provost near the intersection of hwy 41 and 600, south of Czar. Not much to be found for reports, but there has been mention of chewed up trees and shingles, tennis ball sized hail, and a crash between two semi trailer units in the 100km/h+ dust filled winds. Hopefully there will be some more reports tomorrow.

Calgary Herald w/pic
Edmonton Sun
CTV Edmonton

Summer arrived as it should, with a few rumbles of thunder, but it still feels like spring - not warm.
No rain worth measuring since the last post, and now it’s dry again. The grass is crunchy already, the duck ponds in the neighborhood are drying up, and the crops are in obvious need of some moisture, I hope it’s not too late for a save. The field across the road was the first one I saw seeded anywhere around here, on May 4. It started to poke out May 17th and five weeks later it is less than a foot high.
Areas to the far south and far east got a nice inch of rain out of the last system over the weekend, but most of it wound up in Saskatchewan, leaving most of Alberta north of the trans-canada dusty dry.

There could be some goods on the way or not. I am not believing anything I see in the forecast models until summer is over or they start behaving. What you see today in there is likely to look foreign tomorrow, which is making planning more than 12 hours ahead for a road trip almost impossible. We might get 3 inches of rain in the next 10 days or nothing. Better to go outside and look up.

Spring ‘09 was a cold one, the weather station numbers show a full degree colder on average than last year. Sure hope we get some heat before September…

Spring 2007 avg. temp 8.79C - avg. wind 9.7 - gust 15.9km/h
Spring 2008 avg. temp 7.53C - avg. wind 9.2 - gust 15.2
Spring 2009 avg. temp 6.32C - avg. wind 8.5 - gust 14.1

Lots to see today if you like big puffy clouds.
Before noon the cauliflower towers started to sprout to the east of the QE2, and by early afternoon there were a few healthy cells brewing to the north. A invisible lee trough had set up overhead in the westerly flow sometime last night or this morning, the result was convection to the west in the hills, a death line along hwy22 where all convection was erased at the west edge, then a eruption line along the QE2 on the other side along the east edge. Most of the day here was clear and sunny, with towers everywhere else.
The trough began to break down around 6, the winds switched from northwest to east, just in time to meet a bit of energy coming out of the hills. The clash quickly built up a shelfy line of convection full of twisty bits that looked like it might be packing some hail, but thankfully only had 5mm or so of nice rain for us.
A better spreading around of the rain today, to some places that really need it.

Some more rain would be nice.
Looking at the last 3 images below from the Drought Watch site, a lot of folks around the province are asking for the same. Only a few patches of good moisture in the whole land, and those got it all at once. The Red Deer Airport reported 45mm of rain with the shelf passage on Monday, which explains the bullseye there.

A few showers have drifted by here since Monday, bringing our total up somewhere close to 20mm for the week, and it shows. Crops have sprung to life and the lawn almost looks green now. Daily displays of cumulus eruptus are passing the time until some real goodies arrive, which may be as early as tomorrow, depending on who you believe.

It’s the time of year when it’s better to just look out the window and see whats happening.

Today was an interesting day in the neighborhood.
Starting off with a little teaser sprinkle/dewpoint booster early this morning, the temperature quickly climbed back up to the 25 zone and convection started up along the foothills again in the strange south/southeast flow. Waiting for something to break off and move out this way, our humidity dried up again quickly and we were back to 40% by early afternoon. Just before 4pm a patch of convection blew up from nowhere to the southeast of Innisfail. There had been a few little corns popping up out there but they were not amounting to much, this one found something it liked up there and took off.
Within a few scans of the radar, it looked it was going to come this way and be mean about it, but by the time I went to hop in the car to go see, I could already see a shelf forming up and inbound, so I decided to pack a few destroyables in the garage and watch from here instead.
The shelf made a very nice approach, but had no punch when it got here, only a most excellent 10mm of rain and plenty of lightning. Antler hill just north of Innisfail may have saved us from a hailing, it seemed to almost hipcheck most of the storm to the north, breaking off a little piece that went west of here zapping and thundering away.
The main core appeared to go right over the Red Deer Airport, but I haven’t heard of any severe stuff other than a snippet I caught on the Weather Channel saying they had all sorts of reports from Red Deer claiming hail from pea to golf ball size.
Two local storm chasers, Brandon Brown and Brad Derzaph were out watching this thing from different angles, neither saw any hail, and it sounded like there was some core sampling going on.

Edit: A short video of the north edge of the shelf, 8x speed.

Almost there…
It is still very dry around here, but that hasn’t stopped mother nature trying to get some convective action going. Lots of pretty but high based puffs floating around for the past few days, a few of them dropping a shower and a bolt of lightning here and there, meaning north and south of here. Nothing happening here and we have still had no rain.

Today was looking like something might be able to shove off the foothills and give us a shower, so we headed for Sundre before noon to see what was up and by 1 we were watching a nice little storm brewing over the Parker Ridge, southwest of Bearberry. Not a lot to see other than a few good CG bolts, shear was not-existent today, but it was still a beauty day for a spin, passing 26C for the first time this year. Once again, everything evaporated before it got anywhere close to here and all we picked up was a few mm of dust.

June 10, 2007 was such a nice day for watching storms, I decided it was finally time to start one of these web logs to keep a record. 243 posts and 1500+ images later, here we are at June 10 again. It’s been a fun hobby, have met some new friends, learned a lot, and I’m really enjoying looking back to see what happened in the past.

No such luck today, and we might have to wait a bit longer to see anything real interesting around here, dry is still the story. Stuck in the doldrums with the jet stream and all the energy still far to the south, the week has been one of popcorn filled skies with the occasional sprinkle here and there, mostly there. One thunder. ONE. Bah.

Hoping for some rain on the weekend but I fear we may get hosed again, perhaps a rumbler and a sprinkle, but it may all stay west and north of here. I sure hope not. The crops in the neighborhood have stalled out waiting for some moisture and we really need them to lush up to get some juice into the air and get this season started.

If we do wind up with nothing on the weekend, next week looks much better, as long as it doesn’t get carried away and give us too much all at once. The GFS is showing some good amounts of rain for Tues-Thurs, the GEM is saying we stay in the desert while it rains on both sides… it will be interesting to watch how this progresses.
50mm over 3 days would really turn things around.