Tornado Dopplergangers: AccuWeather HQ Shelf Cloud

May 30, 2012; 12:32 PM ET

This afternoon a storm developed suddenly west of AccuWeather HQ. Before I could assemble my tripod, Henry Margusity dragged me from my desk into the lobby to see the storm’s impressive shelf cloud:

There were also some vertical scud at the front of the gust front, creating these funnel-cloud-like features; tornado “dopplergangers” if you will, but we weren’t fooled; there was no rotation associated with them.

Here’s a video starring Henry:

Even when the shelf cloud was over us, the storm didn’t look impressive on radar and I was surprised to see such a defined shelf cloud; the cross-section radar looked a little more severe:

It was hard to see much on the 3-D shot, in part because the storm was too close to the radar, but blog reader Ralph sent me this image (both 2D & 3D were provided by GRAnalyst software):

Further west, Elliot Abrams got this time-lapse from his house:

Again, the shelf cloud, and the scud below it, are very impressive. I took a couple of video stills from his video, showing some interesting vertical structures:

But they are just more tornado dopplergangers — like most of the photos tagged “vertical” on our Photo Gallery. Some of our Pennsylvania Storm Chasers also got a few pictures of the storms.

Over 24,000 lightning strikes hit the state yesterday, with good coverage except for the southeast. I only got one strike on video; the lightning developed suddenly, didn’t last long, and was mostly internal (rain-wrapped) with the storms.

This high-res MODIS satellite shot shows the first line of storms (center) coming through — there was some lightning but not great clouds with these.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com