Alberta Foothills Weather

Long time no post!
It’s been a busy week around here, we started holidays on Monday of last week, with plans to head out to Jasper for a tour, maybe out to Drumheller for a look, but things took a left turn immediately. Hours into the holiday, one of the nastiest computer viruses I have ever seen made it into the old hub computer somehow, then jumped over the network into the good graphics computer and started chewing the hell out of everything. It ate the boot records of all the hard drives in both computers, killed all the recovery stuff, and started a cascade of infection jumping around to all the executables on both machines. Fdisk and format were not enough to get it gone, all drives had to be filled with zeroes to finally purge it. Luckily the laptop stayed out of the mess and was able to help the rebuild along.
Win32/Virut is one nasty piece of work.

Being on holidays and all, the computer mess got tossed on the back burner whenever a cloud of any kind popped up, and we spent a good part of the week toodling around here and there watching all sorts of interesting stuff. After picking up almost 60mm of rain at the start of the week, there was plenty of juice laying around to fuel up some storms, never really amounting to much but still fun to watch. We thought we had gotten a good soaking till we took a tour up to the Gull Lake/Pigeon Lake/Buck Lake area two days later. We talked to a lady in Gull lake who said they got 6 inches out of the deal and her cabin was basically floating the water table was so high. Completely saturated up there.

Best run at a storm would be this past Sunday out west of here.
A wicked warm and wet southeast wind had been blowing all morning, which always gets me looking west, it may have been too much this day, pinning all the goodies up against the foothills, but still giving a nice show later on south of Caroline. We decided not to wait for them to roll out here, and went out there to meet them west of the James River Bridge. Not long after we got set up, the cell we were watching really started to get it’s act together, building a nice wall cloud, trying to get wound up, but lacking good mid level support it couldn’t do it. The hail plane arrived just about then, flew around in the beautiful vault of the storm for a few minutes dropping it’s deadly cargo, then flew away. Minutes later the guts began to fall out of the beast, dropping a downburst that bounced off the ground and got sucked right up into the meso, flaring up some scuds that got shredded up in the weak rotation. That was that and we went home.

It has been too cold for any real monsters to get going, still waiting for the elusive 30C to arrive, pretty crazy to not have seen it by the middle of July, but everything is 3 weeks late, so maybe it is still on the way. Crops have made a massive recovery around here since the rain, canola fields have exploded, doubling or tripling plant size in 5 days, and are now in full flower. Hay fields have sprung to life and a few farmers are actually out making their first cut.
Evapotranspiration is finally in full gear!
Bring the HEAT.