Here in Pennsyltucky, we were getting severe thunderstorm and tornado watches and warnings daily last week and we're still having near-daily thunderstorms this week. It seems way early in the season for that as I normally associate it with hotter weather than we've been having.
The local TV station's weather crew was breaking in to broadcasts to warn residents in various local areas to take immediate cover as they were seeing rotation on weather radar. I can't tell if that's because weather is more severe than it used to be or the weatherman now has more sophisticated tools to see it.
It's out-of-the-ordinary enough that I bought a weather-radar app (RadarScope) (the $10 version) to have a better view. I liked comparing what I was seeing on the TV station's radar display with what I was seeing on the app. And it works better for me than the Nexrad radar screen on Weather Underground.
I'm still trying to get a sense of when the color echoes indicate rotation. The weather guy starts pointing at something he says is rotation and warns viewers to take immediate cover. But I could also see another very similar set of colors nearby and he's not mentioning that area.
It has also been useful to see how quickly the tornado warnings pop up and go away. And the storm tracks allow me to click on the tracks at tick-marks along them to see time-of-arrival of the cell at that point. And if I click on the beginning of the track, up pops the cell name, it's speed, and the size of the hail (if any) in that cell.
At one point we were in a tornado warning and I could see storm tracks close by on either side of us. I went outside with the iPad and was fascinated to watch the storms pass by while I compared what I was seeing on the RadarScope display to what I was seeing in the sky. I didn't even get wet as they passed. To my south, I could see spinning tendrils of cloud drop down out of the ominous-looking wall-cloud, intensify a bit but then slowly just kind of fade out and disappear. Then my view across the corn fields blanked out as the violent rainstorm swept through. To my north, the clouds were darker and roiling but I didn't see a wall-cloud.
I'd like to have lightning strikes but in RadarScope that only comes with a recurring-payment version and I'm not quite willing to do that at this point.
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Edited by Old Crow, 10 June 2019 - 11:20 AM.