12 August chase

Whew!  This has been a very busy storm day, starting with the strong line that roared through DC this morning, just missing our area.  After that passage the atmosphere recovered its instability quickly with abundant sunshine and plenty of moisture, giving rise to more storms early this afternoon.  Picking out a southeastward moving cell I headed to western Spotsylvania county and watched the approach of the storm shown above, with this picture taken at 4:09 p.m.  The storm had already turned right - a good sign of severity - so I felt confident that this was the one to grab as it did have a severe warning on it.  The lowering under this rain free base was trying to organize, drawing in scud from the rain shaft and pulling in air from the south, but I never visually confirmed rotation.  Unfortunately the next storm to the north was the one I SHOULD have chosen as seen in this radar image:

Note the tornado warning box (purple) and the tornado icon!!  One must live with the choices one makes, so I stayed with my storm as long as I could until the rain blanked out visibility.  I then maneuvered my way through central Spotsylvania and wound up in Thornburg, all the while trying to keep an eye on the rain free base.  I managed to catch a few more glimpses of what looked tantalizingly like a wall cloud, but between the tree lines, winding roads, heavy traffic, and intermittent heavy rains I never got another clear view.
There are even more severe storms plowing southward from the DC area as I write this, so I may get another shot at an intercept this evening.  The southern movement of these storms is yet again an example of how weird this season has been.  I have chased very few storms this year that have had the usual southwest - to - northeast trajectory, thanks to the upper level ridge that has altered the storm tracks.  But, a chase is a chase is a chase!

UPDATE 8/14 10:10 a.m.: I changed out the picture of the lowering that I've edited with a new (to me) photo editor:  Photoscape.