I am only an amatuer meterologist, but I'm pretty sure what I saw. Sunday the 30th, about 14:30 CDT, between Ely and Silver Bay, the weather exploded.Most of the time, I imagine, weather is the product of two contrasting air masses, about the size of Delaware at least, slowly rubbing up against each other. What Mrs. Octane a I drove through was more like two trains colliding.
We were about here, letting the dogs do their thing inbetween moderate rain showers, when we got up close and personal with two lighning strikes. Loud cracks to be sure, but then the thunder rumbled constantly for several minutes without a break. I got way dark very quickly, and some hail stared to fall. It wasn't the usual white, opaque, round stuff, this was clear and jagged; exatly like what you see on the street when a car window has been smashed.
Time to go.
We headed south and drove right into it. The rain was so hard I slowed to Ford Motor Company's idle speed. The car was darting on the road over the bumpy weird hail, which was of the pea to marble size; just below the sheet metal damage threshhold. It was the thickest 10 minutes of precipitation I ever saw, and in 15 minutes, the sun was shinng and the roads were dry.
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Tuesday night (8/1) on a sweltering evening we had a 50 mile diameter storm that looked like a red M&M on local RADAR. It moved up rapidly from near Savannah to the suburbs east of Atlanta, moved west across the northern suburbs, then dived southwest toward Montgomery Ala. I was struck by how much this looked like a guided weapon and when it got to our area it dumped almost an inch of much needed rain in 30 minutes. I've eyeballed a lot of storms on RADAR but I've never seen one make a 270 degree turn in a matter of two hours. The path was marked by extraordinary damage to trees and lightning fried several buildings and burned an apartment building to the ground.The path was counter to any weather I've seen here in 30 years.
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