SUMMER 2006 - part 2 (b): Thundercloud Soup!

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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....
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!
Another "TCu" base with scud rotating around it.... That was that for the 3rd, sadly!
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"....
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...
...so that promising-looking clumps of cloud remained just that!
Lunchtime, July 5th, looking west and feeling the sea-breeze.....
....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!
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!
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....
...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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