July
3rd came along and as the heat brewed again and
the sea-breeze kicked in, towering cumulus once
again built up over the mountains....
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Towering
Cumulus with lowerings along base at the top of
the Esgairfochnant escarpment - an area noted for
its wind-eddies, attendant high vorticity and
funnel-clouds!
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Another
"TCu" base with scud rotating around
it....
That was that for the 3rd, sadly!
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July 4th looked like a repeat performance. This
time the towers fired up only just to my east,
again with all sorts of scud-formations along
their bases including several
"pseudo-funnels"....
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As this cloud
grew it put on a particularly good
"scud-funnel" display!
Close-up of the above. Then within half an hour
convection fizzled out and subsided. Lack of
moisture plus an unbreakable mid-level cap
(inversion) were the most likely causes...
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...so that promising-looking clumps of cloud
remained just that!
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Lunchtime,
July 5th, looking west and feeling the
sea-breeze.....
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....while to the east a promising line of
thunderstorms was heading this way....developing
storms and an easterly steering flow meeting a
westerly sea-breeze - this looked good!
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The first storm - an outlier - passed just to my
south. The higher clouds were moving L-R while at
lower levels scud was moving R-L!
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Behind it was this monster, coming over the hill
of course!
I headed SE towards Trefeglwys but this storm
absolutely exploded and was moving westwards so
rapidly that I had to about-turn and head back to
the top of the pass....
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...by which time its leading edge was a couple of
miles away as the crow flies: a dark,
structureless mess which was giving continuous
thunder and clearly torrential rain - the Trannon
wind-turbines are just about visible here if you
peer hard at the photo! A camcorder on a tripod
here would have taken some good lightning
footage!
The storm was not worth hanging around to
photograph owing to its lack of structure, so I
headed back to Machynlleth. Thunder was still
booming away to the east and market traders were
busy packing away before the apparent deluge
arrived.
What we received instead was around 3 hours of
"thundery rain" - steady but not overly
heavy rain, great for the parched gardens. The
storms had clearly entered an environment where
further development was not supported, so they
gradually decayed, raining themselves out in the
process!
In summary, this was a mixed thundery spell for
me. The 2nd was excellent for cloud photography
(eventually). The 3rd and 4th were briefly
interesting but overall damp squibs! The 5th was
poor for photography but if you like sitting up
in the mountains watching a monster coming over
the hill, it was excellent!
Mostly wall to wall sunshine has been on the menu
since (it's now July 15th). More later!
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