We had a particularly large thunderstorm move through Raleigh this evening. I watched it on the radar as it approached from Cary and turned my ham radio on to the Skywarn net as we got ready for dinner. As we were finishing dinner, the skies grew darker and the kids got more excited.
I suggested to Kelly that we move the family to our safe room. Even if nothing happened it would be good practice, as we’ve never done this in our new home here. So with that, the kids began to gather pillows and blankets and put them in our utility room.
A minute or two afterward, I heard a report on the radio of rotating clouds above the NCSU belltower not far away. I suggested Kelly go to the utility room and told her I would join her when things looked safe. I then went to the back porch, which has the best view of the sky.
Immediately I saw that the action was happening in front of the house, so I raced across the house to the front porch. As I stood on the steps, I saw a wispy cloud curl around itself about 500 feet above my head. It was like a horizontal smoke ring. Looking to my right I could see the main storm cloud over Lions Park, and could make out a skinny, cone shape silhouette in the middle of it. The cone quickly dissipated (or became obscured) and the could looked rather disorganized, but dangerous all the same. I called it in to the net and reported what I saw.
I’ve never seen clouds rotate like that before. It moved quite fast, and as I said – it was disorganized. Curiously there was no rain beforehand. I was under the impression that tornadoes usually trail behind the cells that spawn them but this was not the case here.
For an hour after this put doubt into my head about what I saw, but then I found this question on Yahoo Answers that says that the southwest side of a tornadic supercell is usually rain-free. Wikipedia’s supercell entry agrees, as does this NWS thunderstorm page. That was the exact position I was in when I viewed the rotation: the southwest side. I suppose that’s why the net control, Virginia (NC4VA), kept asking me what direction I was facing when I looked at the storm. My confidence was further boosted when I heard a tornado was still being indicated east of Raleigh on radar.
It’s been a long time since I did any storm-spotting and longer still since I had spotter training. Still I didn’t expect to see what I saw and certainly didn’t have nearly enough time to study it. Thank goodness nothing came of this one!
Here’s the WRAL.Com account of the storm (with a misspelled “Lions Park”.)
See, if you’d checked into the SKYWARN net on April 21 & 28 for the refresher basic training, you would have remembered that. 🙂 Actually, she was asking you what direction you were facing so that given your location and direction to the storm, that can be combined with other reports of the same and triangulate where the storm is.
BTW, the local SKYWARN training schedule is at http://www.erh.noaa.gov/rah/skywarn/ It had been way too long for me when I went through the refresher training, so you could probably benefit from it too. Also, note that there’s a NOAA P3 Orion Hurricane Hunter at RDU today from 3-5pm!