Funnel Cloud, Heavy Hail Hit Oregon Coast & Willamette Valley

They caught more than fish, Friday, on board the boat called the “Ruby Sea” .

They also caught this photo taken from the Columbia River of a thunderstorm that created a funnel cloud. This funnel cloud was over land and also reported by a number of eye witnesses in the Costco parking lot in Warrenton, Oregon.

This is approximately where the “Ruby Sea” was when it saw the funnel. Right near the mouth of the Columbia.

Here’s the thunderstorm that produced the funnel — it really pops off the screen with our KOIN Local 6 3-D Doppler. Notice some lightning strikes, too. Then the who line kept moving south to Seaside.

This is downtown Seaside covered in hail (after the storm moved through) on Friday afternoon November 9, 2012. Wow!

And here’s the ‘ol Hood To Coast finishing area, covered in hail, right at the Seaside turnaround. I wish I could’ve seen this in person. That’s a sign of really cold air up above us for a storm to be able to create and then dump this much hail.

And then the line of storms weakened a bit but still dumped some pretty good hail on the Fred Meyer in Newport.

And finally, we had a fairly isolated thunderstorm that crossed over Highway 20 not far from Albany. Kirsten, who took this picture said the road turned very suddenly from wet to deep, slushy, white hail. And that a few cars actually slid off the road as a result.

That’s the intersesting thing about hail: clouds tend to dump it in ‘streaks’ like they were painting a white line down below. Then when the storm is emptied of hail, the ‘streak’ stops until the storm (if it is strong enough) re-develops more hail and dumps it all over again. In this case, just a narrow stretch of Highway 20 was apparently hit by the streak.

What caused all this craziness? A cold center of low pressure moving through and generally speaking, a pretty sudden cooldown from our record warm start to November. Guess you could say Friday was a ‘hail of a day’ a lot of places!