July 6
A very active day around these parts and it started early. Very early.
The thunderstorms of last night settled down early this morning and the skies cleared off just enough to the north for a beautiful display of noctilucent clouds to shine through. Soon after they were drowned out by the rising sun, convection began again, and by noon there were some good storms brewing all over south central Alberta.
We set out around 1 to do a bit of local observing, watching a few big cauliflowers near Red Deer while keeping an eye on a huge anvil out west. By 3 we were out northwest of Spruceview again, watching a squall line develop and move east towards the flower patch. All of the energy took a dip to the south somewhere around Gleniffer lake, then the line really intensified south of Innisfail all the way down to Airdrie, where two tornadoes were reported at 4:40pm. The mayhem continued across southeastern Alberta and off into Saskatechewan where it’s still churning. 38 severe weather bulletins from EnviroCan today containing almost every kind of severe weather in the book have been saved to a page HERE.
We picked up 2mm of soft rain for the day.
that surprises me as you were right in the guns of some of that weather, I thought you got more…..interesting. How about those ec technicians, whats that 3 or 4 days Carvel has been down?? Sometimes it feels like the third world here when it comes to weather.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:50 amYessir it is far beyond a joke now and there really can be no excuse for it. Someone needs to start stomping some butt around there.
July 7th, 2008 at 12:00 pmI heard you saw a tornado or two yesterday? Any comments on that?
Yes Pat thats correct. One of my dreams was to catch up to a tornado sometime in my life. I’ve seen some ugly skies before and a few funnels and several innocent “cold core” funnel clouds, but yesterday the tornado came to me. I arrived back at my house at 4:35pm from an afternoon engagement. As I got within a half a mile I noticed what looked like a funnel quickly forming on the back side of a supercell that was hitting the Carstairs area with lots of rain and hail. As i entered the open area at the end of my subdivision which is at the north edge of Airdrie, I was entertained by a beautiful sight. It was definetly a tornado and there were a couple dozen cars stopped alongside highway 2A watching it. Everyone was amazed. It wasn’t the largest of tornadoes and I never felt threatened as I could see it was moving east. I was about three quarters of a kilometre from it. There was no hail but the winds were prettey wild and erratic. The tornadoe had apparently been preceeded by a smaller one just 2 minutes before but I came onto the second and bigger of the two tornadoes. It picked up lots of surface materials (soil) and some shrubs and a few trees and that was wild. It was down for 3 minutes and luckily hit no farm houses. Before crossing the QE2 highway it disappeared almost as fast as it had come. It was a great testament to the awesome power of nature and how unpredictable one can drop out of the sky like that. There were no warnings issued until 4:49pm I believe. I saw the tornado from 4:38 pm until 4:41pm, so they were 10 minutes too late and unfortunately there would have been quite a bit of damage in that ten minutes of time if it had connected with a farmhouse. Thats the scary part, it will be some time before we can truly catch a tornado in time, maybe never. Anyone may use or quote this if they choose. Thanks
July 8th, 2008 at 12:58 amIt sure was a pretty thing, glad it was out in the field and not a few miles south.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:11 amThanks for the report!