June 21, 2011 Storms - Grand Rapids, MI

A line of thunderstorms with embedded rotation formed on the lake breeze convergence zone at about 4:00 PM. No confirmed tornadoes as of yet but many reports of 1-2" diameter hail and 60-70 mph wind gusts.

The line was extremely slow moving between 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM. It backbuilt over parts of Ottowa county dumping up to 5 inches of rain. You'll notice the rolling "anvil crawler" thunder was pretty much constant. With my naked eye I could make out almost continuous quick flashes of intra-cloud lightning in the anvil. It was too faint for my camera to pick up. There was a weakly rotating mesocyclone and semi-formed wall-cloud / tail-cloud visible over western Kent county. It fell apart before reaching my location though.

Be sure to turn the volume up for the thunder. :) There's no super close cracks as the storm wimped out and stopped producing frequent CGs by the time it got to my location. That was the only real disappointment.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• storm
• thunderstorm
• supercell
• storm chasing
• severe
• lightning
• thunder
• june
• 21
• 2011
• michigan
• west michigan
• grand rapids
• severe weather
• clouds
• sky
• weather

[DisturbedFrankeh]

JESUS! Look how far the top of the storm shoots out. Awesome structure :D

[marshallbs]

@DisturbedFrankeh

Thanks. It was a very dark scary looking storm in the distance as it was moving in from the west but it weakened a lot by the time it reached me. The video doesn't really do it justice. The unusual thing was the continuous crackling of soft thunder inside the anvil. There were absolutely no breaks in the thunder for over an hour. It was also incredibly humid.

[THEREASONIMHERE]

Here in Macomb, yesterday we had basically multiple lighting strikes, or non stop lightning, from a line of storms at about 10 P.M. Today we had a tornado warned storm in Northern Macomb, which may have left damage, followed by a squall line that left torrential rains.