Yesterday after seeing on the Weather Channel radar that some garden-variety air-mass thunderstorms were starting to pop up in our area, I went storm-chasing.
Given that I like to participate in the local ham radio storm nets when we have severe weather warnings, I've since decided that I'd like to be mobile rather than homebound when one of these nets convenes, so I've reinstalled my handheld 2-meter two-way in my car with a cigarette-lighter plug for power and a mag-mount antenna on the roof, and so when we had some thunder happening in the general vicinity I took an afternoon drive and went looking for storms to get close to.
At first when I went out, the atmosphere was so thick I really couldn't see anything very well in the sky -- none of the normal visual cues I've been used to in other places I've lived for locating different kinds of weather. Finally, though, I decided that the sky to the southwest, down I-85, had a kind of "backlit" look that I thought might indicate weather. So I got on the interstate and headed down that way, finally getting a good view of a thunderstorm about 27 miles from home near Hogansville, a town in northeastern Troup County. I left the freeway and bypassed downtown Hogansville, aiming for a spot on U.S. 29 a few miles south of town. Before I reached the highway I began seeing lightning strikes from the storm, and was hearing sferics not only on my AM radio (tuned to 1610 KHz), but also on my two-way which was tuned to the Newnan repeater at 145.13 MHz. Lightning noise in that band indicates some fairly strong discharges, not very far away.
When I reached 29 I had to decide whether to head south on that highway or find a road that would take me west to where the core of the storm seemed to be. Since I didn't know much about the roads south of Hogansville I chose to go north instead, to Mobley Bridge Road which would take me in a northwest direction and from which I knew I could turn off if necessary to more closely approach the storm.
I got a little bit of rain on Mobley Bridge Road, large raindrops that sounded almost like small hail on the roof of my car, but when I reached the intersection with Youngs Mill Road I knew I had to turn southwest to get closer to the storm, so that's what I did. What I didn't realize at that time was that the storm was straddling Youngs Mill Road and headed straight for me -- and that I was headed right into the "bear's cage," the area of most intense weather.
Within minutes I was getting dense, heavy rain and lightning strokes so close I couldn't even finish saying "A thou---" before the thunder reached my ears. The rain became so heavy that I could barely make out a general idea where the road was. Then the rain started letting up, just in time for me to reach a thick ground fog that made visibility even worse. By the time I made it through that I was out from under the worst of the storm, but I couldn't turn off before reaching LaGrange. Once there, there was only one way I could turn toward home without going through downtown LaGrange, and that was by turning on Hammett Road -- which would take me right back toward the thunderstorm I had just come through.
Fortunately I was able to turn off Hammett onto Tin Bridge just before getting too deep into the storm again, and that took me to U.S. 29 maybe a mile or two farther south than I had been while first scouting the storm. I considered re-engaging the storm but decided instead to get closer to home and see if anything had cooked up in Coweta County.
As I scouted along between Hogansville and Newnan, I could still hear sferics on the radio, so I knew there was activity in the county. Then as I reached southern Newnan I got a chance to see a larger view of the sky and saw that there seemed to be something off toward Senoia. I headed out of southern Newnan on Georgia 16, watching the dark clouds as I approached Sharpsburg and the junction with Georgia 54, and decided that to avoid punching the core again I should turn south on 54 and maybe go behind the storm via Gordon Road. As I set out on 54 I began seeing lightning strokes, and again I got rained on as I passed the outer edges of the storm. I passed well west of the core and turned on Gordon Road toward Haralson, which is a few miles south of Senoia. It didn't take long before I began to see that I was well behind the storm, so rather than go all the way to Haralson I cut off toward Senoia via Luther Bailey Road.
The drive to Senoia was more or less uneventful, but when I got there and could see the storm clearly again I realized it lay pretty squarely between me and Thomas Crossroads, the area of Coweta County that is home. I didn't want to retrace my steps to circumvent the storm again, so I decided I had to take the highway (Georgia 16) west back toward Sharpsburg and hope for the best. By the time I reached Turin I had again encountered poor visibility due to rain and ground fog.
When I got back to the 16/54 junction at Sharpsburg I found that the core was just moving into town. I turned north on 54 and did the best I could to outrun the storm. At one point some miles north of Sharpsburg there was another "One thou---" lightning-thunder interval. But by the time I reached the main east-west route that went through Thomas Crossroads I was well out of the weather. And my fuel gauge light was on.
I stopped at a gas station at Thomas Crossroads to fill up, and as I stood pumping gas the storm was coming on, making a heck of a racket. Shortly thereafter, as I arrived home to the sound of loud thunder, I came in the door and said to my wife, "It followed me home, can I keep it?"
The heavy rain was pretty spectacular at home too, and in one instance a flash of lightning was followed at a barely perceptible interval by a loud BOOM of thunder. After the storm I went into the backyard and studied the trees just beyond the property line trying to determine which had been struck. Finally I spotted a pine, the uppermost branches of which had no needles, but plenty of pine cones.
In the event of severe storm warnings, I think I'll stay behind the storm, looking for damage. Let somebody else report the golf-ball-sized hail as it's falling.
