Alberta Foothills Weather

Despite being under a tornado watch for the afternoon, and a a brief flareup of pretty clouds, today was quiet and cool around here, all the action was way down southeast.

Yesterday was not quiet.
I spent the afternoon trolling the foothills, waiting for something to fire up. Out to James River bridge,nothing. Out to Corkscrew mountain, nothing. Then around 6pm a giant cell started moving out between Rocky and Drayton Valley, so I headed up #22 to meet it. At first sight it had a nice big anvil with an overshooting top and a train behind. Lots of pretty structure to look at until the white sheet of hail at the intersection of #22 and #53, west of Rimbey. Followed just behind the core into Rimbey, coming very close to seeing a spinup at the intersection of #53 and #766.
Rimbey took a good hit and was covered with a few inches of pea/grape sized hail and flooded streets meant they had obviously had some heavy rain, but that was nothing compared to a few miles southeast where there was a serious covering of hail up to 6 inches deep, leaving flooded fields and crops chewed beyond recognition.
After floating around on the winter style gravel roads checking the hail out for a while, a large shelf started to form to the northwest so I started for home. It got nastier, greener, and more electrical the further southeast it went, and by just short of Sylvan was a classic green hailer. The lake seemed to split the storm, with the ugliest part going up 11A and the nice light rain coming down here. Heard there was some good sized hail around Jarvis bay on the north side of the lake.
I wasn’t even back in the yard and I could see huge cloud to ground lightning off in the distance to the south, so after a quick check of the radar I was back out the door going south to watch a very angry storm move in from the SW, constantly dropping massive bolts.
20 minutes later I was back home frantically unplugging everything before it got here. Intense lightning, sheets of hail bits and pouring rain for about 20 minutes, leaving 25mm(1″) in the rain guage and a hail drift at the back door. We lost power a few minutes into the deluge and it stayed out all night.
Not long after that, another batch of sparks brewed up in a line from Olds to Stettler, very angry storms with almost non stop lightning. The last watch/warning was lifted just before 7am.

These are in the order they were shot, starting about 10km up highway #22 from Rocky at 6:17pm.

And these three are from this afternoon during our tornado watch, a few miles west of Markerville.