supercell in Romania

[Menno van der Haven]

In the early evening of June 18th a severe thunderstorm passed my location in Romania. Windshear was quite good (40 kt from the west at 500 hPa according to the 12Z Bucharest sounding with a weak northeasterly surface wind observed at my location).

An interesting stacked plates wallcloud was visible for some time (approx 15 minutes) before rain and hail arrived at my location:

At the same time in the southeast there there were other strong storms, some with a backsheared anvil:

As the walcloud passed the city of Tirgu Mures, according to a local newspaper, hail with the size of wallnuts was observed.

Against sunset I tried some lightning-photography with other, weaker storms, but I wasn't very succesfull, except for this one:

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Thanks for posting that... very interesting to see storms outside the usual areas we hear about.

I went and checked out the sounding:

Doesn't look like a whole lot of CAPE, but definitely a unidirectional profile with decent bulk shear. I would expect a lot of splitting storms from this situation... in fact I wonder if in the middle picture we are looking at a left mover with that hard tower on the left, and a right mover with that well-developed anvil on the right.

Tim

 

[Paul Austin]

Very interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing, Menno. With such a tightly wound and picturesque updraft, I would be curious to know if this storm was interacting with a boundary, be it synoptic or mesoscale in nature. Are there any radar images available?

 

[Menno van der Haven]

Thanks for the reply.
I have some low-resolution radar-images saved, Paul. And yes, Tim is right about the splitting storms:

My storm is near Tirgu Mures. The splitting storm on the second photograph can be found E-NE of Sibiu.
Truly an interesting situation it was with a lot of hail-damage to crops. Though CAPE in Europe is mostly not as large as in the US, decent shear is often available.
Last Sunday relatively large parts of the eastern Netherlands and western Germany were hammered by 2 inch hailstones.