Sturm und Drang

"Whine Whine Twang Twang,
Don'cha love the sturm and drang"

-- lyrics from one of my favorite CW acts "Doyle and Debbie" (check out their website: http://www.doyleanddebbie.com/ brilliantly funny!!! Order their CD, it's hilarious -- that is what I hear when I hear country music.

Some of you may have read that there was a big storm in Camrose yesterday. The storm formed right over my farm, and then passed eastward where it hit the Big Valley Jamboree at 6 pm. One person was killed and about 15 others were taken to hospital (for more coverage go to the Calgary Herald website http://www.calgaryherald.com/story.html?id=1853641 ).
It was storm weather -- about 30 degrees, humid, and windy. At about 5:55 I saw the horses come racing from the north fence to the barn, the sky at that point was getting darker and beginning to congeal into waves. One of my cats started meowing really loudly and pacing from room to room. I knew something would hit us, but it didn't look like a tornado, the clouds were not dark enough and the wind at that point was still hot.
About 5 minutes later, the wind began to blow within the cloud layer, and the clouds moved very very quickly in waves.
This picture is two photos stitched together, over the northwest corner of my farm:


This is the front of the system against my north boundary:






Shortly after 6 the wind swept downward, and we got hit with a hurricane force -- the windspeed must have been about 120 to 140 kms per hour. The hot air mixed with cold air -- within two minutes the temperature had dropped from 30 to 15 degrees. That mixture could form tornados.
We got just the beginning of the storm -- the full force was to hit farther east of here. They reported hail and electric storms in Camrose, but here we just had torrential rain and heavy winds, though we saw lightning north and south of us.
No damage to report here other than a couple of weird things: my front gate was open even though it had been padlocked (the padlock was laying open on the ground with the heavy gauge chain that holds it) and the inside door of the barn, which was also locked, was blown wide open. I can't explain how two locks were opened by a storm, can you?

This is what the south side of my property looked like as the storm reached my house and began passing east. That bright cloud is south of Camrose, about 30 kms from here.







Today is also good weather for forming storms: again it is hot and humid and eerily still.