Tornadic Week In New England, New York

The tornado warnings have been flying for the past few days in parts of New England and New York as a couple dynamic systems have gone through. 

Large thunderstorm erupting over the northwestern
tip of Vermont Saturday evening.

Here in Vermont, no tornadoes are known to have touched down. However, a supercell that did produce a probable tornado in eastern New York prompted a tornado warning in Bennington yesterday. 

The first outbreak came Thursday, as a system roared down from central New York and into Connecticut. A strong EF-1 tornado roared along an 11-mile path around North Haven and Hamden, Connecticut, causing extensive damage to several homes and trees.

Microburst and something called a rear-flank downdraft caused added destruction. A rear flank downdraft is an area of very strong winds that follow behind a tornado and help feed it.

Yesterday, an area in the Albany/Saratoga area in New York and southwestern Vermont appeared primed for rotating stormsl

Sure enough, a rotating supercell developed well southwest of Albany and then produced an apparent tornado near Ballston Spa, Stillwater and Schaghticoke, New York.  A house reported had its roof torn off and a high school was damaged.  

 Both Thursday and Saturday, meteorologists sensed trouble days in advance as forecast conditions called for a lot of instability and winds changing speed and direction with height. That's a good recipe for rotating thunderstorms.  That's especially true just south of warm fronts, which happened both Thursday and Saturday. 

Thunderstorms departing to the east of Sheldon,
Vermont glow in Saturday evening's sunset.

There's no sign of anything major coming up in the next few days, so I guess we're safe from twisters.

It was interesting seeing what the changing wind speeds and direction with height could do with a storm that wasn't as intense as those in Connecticut and eastern New York in the past few days 

A thunderstorm right along the Canadian border in northwestern Vermont prompted a severe thunderstorm warning Saturday evening. 

Driving around in the thunderstorm, I did not see any signs of damage from it. 

At one point, I was on the southwestern flank of the storm in Swanton, Vermont.  That's often the part of the storm where you'd find a tornado.

To be clear, this was NOT a tornadic thunderstorm, and I saw no real funnels or fast rotation. But over Swanton, you can see some weak rotation and fairly rapidly rising, marked by filaments of scud clouds rising fast and twisting gently. You can see in this video that I've speeded up (double speed) to see.