Satellite Captures Storms Breaking Like a Wave Over Toronto

Click on this screenshot to watch an animation of GOES-13 satellite images showing storms developing and then enveloping Toronto on July 8th. The torrential downpours broke records in the city and resulted in massive flooding. (Source animation: GOES Project Science/NASA & NOAA.) In my earlier post about Monday's Toronto deluge, I mentioned that I would continue to look for remote sensing imagery of the storms that inundated the city. Click on the screenshot above for what I've come up with so far — an animation of GOES-13 images that I've uploaded to Youtube. I started with the eastern view of the GOES-13 satellite for a time period spanning the event. (You can find the most recent GOES images and animations here.) Then I did some cropping of the animation to emphasize what happened over Toronto. Lastly, I added some explanatory text at the beginning. In the video, look for a line of clouds beginning to build in the upper left quadrant of the frame, west of Lake Michigan. Those clouds then move east, blossoming at some points, covering Lake Huron, and then approaching Lake Ontario from the north and west. At about 18:00 hours UTC (look for the time stamp at the top of the video frame), the clouds seem to begin breaking like a wave over the lake, including the city of Toronto on its shore. By 20:00 UTC, or 4 p.m. local time, torrential downpours are battering the city. The rest is history.