Well, that was a Christmas to remember! The storms I saw that day were some of the biggest I have ever seen.
My father and I headed out when we noticed quite a nice anvil forming to our West. This cell was an absolute beast, anviling out within 10 minutes! Here's a picture of what we saw.
Five or so minutes past until we were ready to leave to chase this storm. When we finally left our house, the storm had grown to a truely massive size! It was so huge that I could not even get it all in the shot.
After a short drive we decided to park on top of a small hill and watch the cell as it grew. This is a pano of what we saw.
At this point, this cell was intensifying rapidly! Lightning and thunder were quite frequent at this point in time as the rain core grew rapidly. It wasn't long before we were confronted with this.
While moving position to get a closer look, we saw a massive chunk of ice hit the road and smash. This was only the first as golf ball-sized hail stones started pounding on the roof of our car. We had never seen hail this size before! Not wanting to risk denting our car, we turned around rather quickly!
What was amazing was at this point, we wern't close to the actual core! This made me wonder just how big the hail this storm was producing actually was! After we had escaped the hail, I looked back to see this...
That was the most amazing thing I had seen in a storm since I started photographing them two years ago! Little did I know what would occur later!
On returning home, a new cell had developed off the back of the storm pictured above. This storm also had a black core on radar. I was amazed at the greenage I saw when I looked up!
And here's a lowering from underneath the rain free base
This cell also had a nice rain/hail core.
Later on in the afternoon. The Fiskville supercell came knocking at my front door. My father drove me around to the local park to get some pictures of this storm. What confronted us was absolutely amazing! There was some very nice greenage surrounding a shelf-like structure to the south but, what was more impressive, was what was directly overhead. The whole structure was rotating, rotating quicker than anything I had ever seen before. Beneath this structure was a vast mess of scud being sucked up into the storm accompanying several suspicious lowerings. The whole mass of cloud was rotating incredibly fast. As it moved closer, the wind slowly picked up before peaking as the structure was almost overhead. The wind roared powerfully with huge gusts sending masses of debris flying past us. It was at this point we decided it was time to get back to the car!
Upon returning home, lightning and hail greeted us. These hailstones were much smaller than the ones from the cell earlier in the day, being roughly the size of 10 cent pieces. At home, I plugged the camera into my computer to see the images I had captured. I was worried to see no pictures stored? As it turned out, in the rush to see the structure before the rain and hail came, I had left the memory card in my computer at home!!!! This still hurts to this day! I had taken panoramas and other shots that I would have loved to have seen how they turned out, but I guess I'm just going to have to rely on video stills
Anyway, it was an amazing day with three crazy supercells intercepted.
Hope you all enjoyed the brief report and pictures and I'm very sorry for the powerlines in the shots
I will try and get screenshots of what I saw of the Fiskville supercell up in the next couple of days
Cheers, Cam