Severe Storms!

I did it! I survived my first Tornado Watch!

Source: weather.gov

Source: Wunderground.com/radar
Red shaded area indicates Tornado Watch area.

Ok, the watch was technically south of Charlottesville and the warning expired before the storm reached me. Oh well. I've experienced worse storms than this one anyways. 

The individual cells approaching Charlottesville diverged as they approached the city. On my walk back from class I felt a few sprinkles, but hardly enough to get the ground wet.

While Charlottesville dodged the storm, storm spotters reported strong winds and quarter sized hail near Lynchburg and Beckley, WV.

Radar is one of the most handy tools for nowcasting the weather (nowcasting describes the current weather and makes an extremely short weather forecast). The reason is because satellites don't take pictures often enough, and weather station data found on sites like MesoWest are not always "live" because of poor latency. Latency is the time delay between when an observation is made and when that observation is available for use. My weather station, for instance, sends an observation to MesoWest every 15 minutes, but it takes between 10 and 20 minutes before that observation appears in MesoWest's database.

Me and the storm splitting around Charlottesville.

The evening brought stratiform rain showers. CHAV2, south of Charlottesville, report 0.90 inches between 3 and 9 PM, and it's still coming down!

Source: Wunderground.com/radar

Source: Mesowest.utah.edu

UPDATE: June 12, 2014

Walking to class the morning after the storm I saw some of the aftermath--a lot of broken limbs and leaves on the ground. I heard from a friend that north of the university some larger limbs and also a tree had fallen down.

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Charlottesville shared this picture on their Facebook page:

Source: Experience Charlottesville