Here we go again (slightly O/T)

[jeffers_mz]

I like to impress the kids when they visit every other weekend, and had everything ready to knock out a large quantity of terrain immediately after the last visit, and made good progress last week, but now I'm running into a bind, for reasons well beyond my control.

Yesterday I detailed in some lightweight spackling ridgelines, took a break, and logged online, and about the time I arrived here, heard thunder. Before I could load the first thread, the NWS threw a T-storm warning for the county just west of me, and I pulled up the radar and it looked ugly.

There was a storm headed in, that was well out front of the main line. Behind it, the main line had a right angle bend in it (corners in line storms are bad places to be) such that the corner, then the main entire line was set to pass overhead.

The first storm wasn't out of the ordinary, lots of lightning, appreciable wind and rain, and just before it hit, my neighbor came outside to look at it and we ended up chatting until the lightning got too close and then we retreated to our respective homes.

Immediately after the first storm passed over, the main line sucked it backwards right into the corner, with the result that three different storms were coming my way at once. That was when they threw the first tornado warning, not just aimed at my location once, but twice.

When they name the applicable corners of the three counties that meet near me, it's a bad sign. When they also name the tiny, not even big enough to have a gas station town a mile west of me, then you know you're in trouble. They plotted the twister to arrive some 35 minutes hence, so I went outside for a look.

To the immediate NW there was what appeared to be a gust front, but later examination of radar and pictures showed it to be a rotating wall cloud, the kind of cloud that puts down twisters maybe half the time. But this was in the wrong direction to coincide with the warning.

I walked over to the neighbor's and knocked on the door, to make sure they knew we were under warning, and we all moseyed out to the front yard for a better view. There was another rotating wall cloud off to the southwest, incredible inflow, clouds all just zipping towards one point under the storm base, and then getting sucked up into the main updraft like ping pong balls.

About that time I noticed swirling cloud below the wall cloud and sure enough, within ten seconds a fully formed tornado appeared. We could see the debris cloud under it, and over the course of about three minutes, it didn't change it's location on the horizon at all. Another bad sign, twisters upstream of you that don't appear to move are headed directly at you.

I got a few pics, (the twister was up and down during this time, intermittant) and when the lightning got close we all headed back to shelter again. By now we could tell that the twister would pass just south of us, but not by much.

I was still watching out the back door until the rotating area was about 60 seconds away from closest approach, and planned to scoot to the shelter about then, but just as I started to turn away, I spotted yet another tornado about three miles due south of me.

No issues in the shelter, and no damage when I emerged, but the warning had gotten the NWS all steamed up, and so we were technically under threat for another two to three hours as the rest of the storm line pounded us over and over. One more trip to the shelter when the wind drew up, but nothing else happened.

I got to bed late, after processing the pics and sending them to a local news station who was reporting that the tornadoes were false alarms, and after a very few hours, was woken up by more thunder around noon today. No warning graphics on TV, electrical sigature ambiguous, and the initial gust front passed by uneventfully, though the storm was electrically very active.

Then, just as the storm seemed about to wane, the rain went blinding, pea sized hail started falling, and then the wind turned evil, making me worry it could break the glass front door.

After emerging from the storm shelter for the third time in less than 24 hours, I went outside to a gorgeous day and drove around trying to backtrack the twister from the previous night. Nearing the end of the loop, in an area where I expected no damage, I was surprised to find large quantities of trees down, live healthy trees and branches up to 28 inches in diameter. Asking the work crews when this happened, they all agreed it was a product of today's storm, not from last night.

So as I return home, I notice vertical development along a new line to my NW, really a surprise as we appeared to be well into gorgeous conditions behind the front.

So about ten minutes ago they put up a new watch, which rapidly deteriorated to T-storm warnings, and naturally, one look at the radar shows the biggest red bloob visible headed right for me, yet again.

I will post some pics later on when I have moire time, but now I have to drop the network and furnace so that power spikes don't kill them (we have ugly power problems this far out) and make sure I can get to the shelter quickly.

I know, it's all just an excuse for my laziness, no law says i can't work on the layout when it's storming a little bit, but all of a sudden, it seems that the atmosphere gods don't like my mountains.

:-(

[SpaceMouse]

Some people will use anything for an excuse. At least you have enough knowledge of self to admit it.

[dragenrider]

Wow, this needs to be over on the storm chaser's forum!!!

[Darth Santa Fe]

Wow, now that really stinks. Storms like that are no fun at all, especially when they're putting tornados right by you![:O][:O][:O] But, it's good to hear you're OK.[:D]

Back when I was about 8-10 years old, we had a real bad storm over our house in the country, which produced a short-lived tornado. My dad and older brother were both looking out the window, but ,because we were surrounded by trees, they never saw the tornado. But when they saw corn leaves flying through the air, that was a pretty good sign there was a tornado.[:O] It did end up missing us, so that was a good thing.[:D]

Another time, when I was about the same age, we were staying on the second floor condo of a string of small hotel buildings in Michigan, which had walls made about 2/3 out of glass! Everything was quiet, when we were very suddenly hit by 80 MPH straight-line winds! It lasted 7 minutes, just a constant loud blowing, and then it stopped. Somehow, not one building was really damaged (one did have a tree hit it, but it only knocked a couple roof shingles off), and the string of cars in the parking lot was completely missed by the flying tables, chairs, sticks and lamp posts. We took a walk after that, and everything but the buildings and cars was damaged by the winds.

[Anonymous]

Interesting link.
I can't remember why these get truncated. Might have to do a bit of cut and paste.

http://singlenesia.com/news/cache/?p=030319-17&l=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.weatherwise.org%2F02ja.cerveny.html

[jeffers_mz]

Chip, I had an idea. You're a construction guy, perhaps you could supervise moving the layout into the shelter, while I make sure the beer is properly chilled?

Dragenrider, the problem here is that I'm not chasing these storms, they're chasing me!

Darth, that wind you describe in the hotel sounds like a downburst. Those can be wicked. I once observed one from between the girders of a highway overpass (not a recommended practice). It was like being beside a raging river in full flood. It snapped thousands or even millions of trees off at the 15 foot level, in a quarter mile wide by 22 mile long path across the city. None of the houses or buildings were seriously damaged, but the cleanup took months.

Jeremy, nice link. Ever read about the military pilot whose plane died and had to bail out near a T-storm? The inflow dragged his parachute into the storm and took him up to 60 or 70 thousand feet.

Twice.

The wind, hail and the cold pretty much beat the stuffing out of him but he lived. You know....with the proper equipment...

;-)

As promised, here's some pics.

First off, the mountains:



This one is from yesterday, a rotating wall cloud to my immediate NW:



This one was snapped at about the same , showing a different rotating wall cloud and the tornado, roughly two miles upstream from me. Besides the twister, the striking thing there was the speed at which surrounding clouds were sucked into the bottom of thew wall cloud. It had a voracious appetite.



I shot this one today, after the first round of storms, while backtracking yesterday's tornado:



This one is from the second round of storms today:



The last one was taken as the second line of storms moved off to my south. This storm was reported to have dropped 2 inch hail, never any fun. You can probably see the hail shaft, just left of the distant grain elevator:



That's all for now, but the news tonight said we're looking at more severe storms tomorrow. No idea where we're going to put any more water, we're full up. While driving around this morning, there were several instances of cornfields draining across the road, and one person's yard was between six inches and a foot deep in a solid mass of sodden cornstalks from last year. It will take a front end loader and more than one dump truck to clean it up.

Off to the layout, who knows, maybe I can get a little work done tonight and sleep right through any nastiness tomorrow.

:-)

[tomikawaTT]

You can't mess with Mother Nature! You can't reason with the *****, either.

Glad that you dodged the fusillade ('way more than one bullet!)

Had a downburst flatten a bunch of trees on my property when I lived in Tennessee. One took out a second floor deck. A little farther over and it would have gotten the room that housed my layout. Being down in the bottom of a ravine didn't protect us.

Building a layout in a bermed-over concrete bunker is starting to look like the way to go.

Chuck

[jeffers_mz]

I agree, Chuck. I'm watching the news now, we have a slight risk for severe weather today, and tomorrow has been designated a moderate risk day. The NSFC is very conservative on this type projection, in my experience people die on moderate risk days.

A couple years back we had a moderate risk day the day of the Indy 500. A twister tracked all the way in from Terre Haute, better than 70 miles, missed the Speedway and a quarter million unprotected fans by a handfull of miles, and tracked most of the way across the city.

Today and tomorrow's activity will be enhanced by humidity, we have standing water everywhere. My lake is totally and completely full, and I don't even have a lake, just a small pond.

:-)

In any event, glad your layout survived the downburst, and I'm hoping for a little of the same kind of luck here this week.

[james saunders]

Man! That is one mean looking storm!!

-James-

[sidflak]

Upon returning home from a three-day trip to Vermont, I went down to check the humidity in the basement . I fired up the layout and discovered, to my horror, that my NCE power Cab had suffered a stroke. We had a couple of routine thundershowers during my abscence and apparently the Power Cab caught a spike (or something) and ended up partially paralized. I called NCE and described the conditions and symptoms and they directed me to send it in. Apparently they have seen this before. So, the moral of the story is, never leave your layout unattended if there is a possibility of severe weather. From now on I use typical computer protection procedures, UNPLUG IT!.

[bogp40]

The way the story was going, I thought it was going to have a horrible ending. Like the layout room was on it's way to Emerald City. Glad you came out OK.
Bob K.

[Anonymous]

Interesting, especially for us "foreigners" who don't get your weather... but you missed out the most important bit... What did you have for breakfast??? [}:)][;)][(-D]

Glad the bad stuff missed you.

Interesting pics. There's a lot of snow on those mountains! You gonna run a rotary?

Would this weather be found just west of Chicago and could the early edge of storm sky be put into a back scene???

Have a nice dry day [:P]

Correction... those are GREAT pics (and they loaded in no time at all![:)]) Any chance of a few more? One of them even showed a "trash can up a utility pole" [8D][8D]

[Darth Santa Fe]

Wow! Those are some nasty looking clouds![:O] It's amazing how dark a few clouds can make an afternoon.

Seeing the green skies in your pictures reminded me of something that happened a month or two ago. I was watching an episode of Lost around 2 in the afternoon, when the sirens went off. After spending a few minutes in the basement, I decided to look up the stairs at the large window in my living room. All I saw was a dark-green glow, and there was less light in the living room than there is at 8:00 at night (around Summer). A few hours later, I heard that some 3 in. hail had missed my house by about 2 blocks![:O]

Oh, and, by the way, those mountains are looking really nice.[:D]

[selector]

They are super looking mountains! The clouds are of the type that seem to show up over relatively flat land....certainly the prairies.

I can remember looking to the east of Winnipeg one summer, maybe it was '92, and seeing a large, black cloud that must have been halfway to Steinbach. It was a beautiful cumulo-nimbus that bore an uncanny resemblance to the human brain in profile. More weirdly, it was firing internal lightning so quickly, and so effectively, that I had to mention that it was a pefect model for a functioning brain. Oh, and it was powerful and scarey. I felt badly for anyone who was under it at the time.

[jeffers_mz]

James, those are four different storms, in less than 24 hours. Neither Sunday nor Monday were there any official risk of severe weather. Today we are under a "slight" risk (bad news, camp out in the basement, somebody will lose big pieces of house) and tomorrow we are under a moderate risk (write your will). Oh joy.

Sidflack, the problems we have here are usually when the power comes back up. Drop outs, unless they are the ugly kind, like live lightning feeding into your equipment, or in and outs, don't seem to cause much problem. But if the stuff isn't unplugged when the grid comes back up, look out. Big issue is phone lines and modems, they get unplugged if there's even a chance of storms. Even tiny overvoltages can bake a modem. The PC's are on surge protectors and are just shut down on storm days. Same for the furnace/AC. So far, no issues this year.

Bob, Emerald City was more of a possibility Monday than Sunday, even though I saw no twisters the second day. With the nearest treeline or other obstacle miles away we always get some wind out here, but Monday's first line of storms was something special. I went a little crazy building this house, tying it down about twice as well as any code ever required. Even still, the cats went to level 5 alert yesterday, as they always do when the entire building starts vibrating. The shelter is under a porch, think 8 inch thick concrete cube, with a six inch grid of 3/4" rebar, 90 percent underground. The cats tried to follow me in, and that's never happened before in 10 years at this location.

David, that system was in fact around Chicago too, though we live about 200 miles south of there. If you want to use any of those for a backdrop, feel free, but if you tell me what you like and give me some time, I have better originals (2250x 1700 pixels instead of 800x600), and less unique shots too. They load much faster when I drop them to 800x600 and jpeg compress them to Photoshop level 3. Those trash cans seem to attract lightning, and they fail spectacularly when struck.

The prototype storms on the Silverton line shut down the RR each winter. A rotary, given time, can deal with a 26 foot snow, but not with avalanche chutes that run 10 times a season. Embedded pine trees are rough on rotary blowers. :-)

Darth, as scary as greenage can be, brownage is even worse. When you see mud brown clouds, you know there's only one way for real earth to get up there, and that's via a tornado. The only threat level higher than that is when it starts raining cows or pigs. Thanks for noticing the mountains.

If these storms let up, they are only a week or two away from paint, fuzz and foam, which means that we are only that long from getting to run trains again. Masking tape on all your track kind of sucks.

[jeffers_mz]

Selector, my all time favorite storm was a couple years back, when I walked out to leave for work around 10:15pm. One single supercell, about 20 miles south of me, edgelit from the left by a full moon, a classic anvil rimed in vivid blue moonlight.

Up and down the main shaft, blue-white diffuse glows showed the internal electrical structure, with orange cloud to ground strokes underneath and arcing all up and down the outside of the tower, bottom to top, underneath the anvil.

To get to work, I had to run 20 miles east, then 10 south, then 3 west. As I walked in the front door, I was directly underneath the southeast side of the vertical tower. Same deal as before, that whole side was now lit up in moonlight, still electrically active, but the difference then was that I was looking stright up a 60 or 70 thousand foot cylinder, lit within by blue fire and sparking all along it's length with orange bolts. No time for pictures, since my time of arrival was stored in the computers that controlled the badge swipes, and I'm still kicking myself for not blowing off work and shooting pictures anyway.

[Don Gibson]

JMZ:

I'm impressed with your mountain - but I don't think they have any like that where you are.

With your kind of weather, I'd consider hangin' an Athearn locomotive with a cow or two by wire over my layout. Have you thought of digging a shelter big enough for a fridge and a 4X8?

DG

[Anonymous]

Thanks... you don't have an E mail here... if you E mail me I'll get back.

I'm dead jealous... no-one has flamed you yet...[;)]

No spectacular weather but something I've seen out on the track at night - that i didn't even know could occur - was a double halo rainbow round the moon... amazing!

I guess that ice storms are fairly usual. Again on the track I have seen minute particles of ice falling... beautiful! Again (don't know if you get them) I have seen ice crystal trees... only about an inch tall but made of thousands of tiny pieces of ice. Nature is amazing and one of the little realised things of railroading is the chances we get to see some special sights.

Look forward to hearing from you.

[Anonymous]

I love severe Thunderstorms.

[jeffers_mz]

Don,

No we don't have mountains like that here, but we do have a highway overpass about 6 miles away that tops 21 feet. I usually stop about halfway up to acclimatize, no sense rushing into the death zone and acquiring altitude sickness, you know?

We got a by Tuesday, all the uglies went south of us, and another by overnight, a pretty unusual electrical event went by to the north. Today is the big day though, two chances at fun, one this morning and another this afternoon. Like most folks, part of me says, "oh well, just another storm day", but after a while, you recognize when the NSSL types are nervous and today, they are.

David, yes double halos are possible but rare. I think they form at 22.5 and 45 degrees, with the outer one being usually fainter. Some other unusual geometric configurations are possible, some really odd stuff, like what you'd get with a compass, trying to bisect triangles and such. I've seen sun dogs and halos, also the aurora, but nothing any more unusual than that.

In the Rockies, those little ice trees can form on every point on every pine tree at a certain altitude, it is an unbelievable sight.

Speaking of railroading and special sights, while out tracking a rumored touchdown today, a train turned up, and after a 5 minute high speed pursuit (no more than 4 mph over posted, ever), I was able to get out front and snag a single image of a pair of CSX locos pulling a string of gons, really screwing it down, out in open country. They were smoking hard just prior to the pic, but he reached the top of a downgrade just short of me and backed off. I was less than ten feet from the rails and still got a decent pounding, I love the power of those big diesels.

He was flying down that grade, I chased him again, but never closed up even a foot and had to break off when a cop followed me into the next town down the line. I'm thinking SD-50's, but they were moving so fast I didn't get a chance to inspect closely and the pics are ambiguous to an illiterate like me.



BNSFrailfan, storms, trains, tanks, lasers, rockets, novas, any kind of big power, especially the loud or the visually impressive, do it for me.

:-)

[fsm1000]

Awww whats a little storm? I been electricuted, it's nothing really. Except memory loss, balance problems, memory loss, sight problems, memory loss, hearing problems, stuff like that.Oh yeah and memory loss LOL [:P]