6/21/2010 - Rockford, IL Supercell Lightning

I had just been complaining to Sharon earlier Monday about how we never see isolated supercells north of I-80 in Illinois. Ha! Once again, Ma' Nature throws me a bone, all the while laughing and laughing. I kept an eye on eastern Iowa all day, but had work and baby obligations that prevented a trip westbound. Storms did develop across se IA, but were out of my evening range. Luckily, after the little one was down for the night, I took off for new development in far northwest IL. I intercepted a mature supercell as it entered the Rockford, IL region. Since it was now nearing twilight, I was not necessarily tornado or structure chasing, but did setup for lightning just north of Stillman Valley. The storm produced some nice bolts, a few which I captured. It strengthened a bit after a merger and even produced a nice wall and tail cloud, which looked very interesting for a moment on the southwest side of Rockford. Alas, it did not produce (thankfully since it was in a very populated region).

A couple of animated gifs illustrating structure are available here.

Storm maturing again just west of Rockford.

Wall cloud in southwest Rockford.

6/18/2010 -- MCS Shelf Fest

Awoke in Waterloo, IA to storms already ongoing and coalescing across west-central Iowa -- not a good sign for potential tornadic supercell development for later that evening thanks the squeegee effect of MCSs. I had no other choice but to follow this stuff home, so I jumped on the "shelf" train near Marengo, IA.

Shelf comes into focus west of Iowa City.

Shelf along I-80. If you click on the image, you'll see a tiny black dot along the edge of the shelf. That is an old school plane -- I was speechless as I watched the guy/gal literally hug the shelf as he/she moved south. Bet that was a hell of a view!

Panoramic shot.

Another pany shot.

I essentially let this thing tail me all the way to DeKalb, IL. The shelf along the derecho in Illinois was not as dramatic as it was in Iowa. Made it home to say hello to Sharon and Chase as the storms swept through -- producing some moderate tree damage and power outages. Appears as though the gusts were in the 55-65 mph range based on some of the limb/tree debris around my neighborhood.

Since it was still early in the day, I decided to head back west towards the Quad Cities area where a northward surging outflow boundary was straddling the IA/MO border. The best area of convergence along this boundary was southwest of Des Moines, which was problematic in terms of timing (at least for me to get there before nightfall). Instead, I went to Quad Cities with (1) the hope that the storms to the southwest of Des Moines would move into southeast Iowa before sunset (thus making them catchable), (2) hope for new development along the outflow in extreme southeast Iowa (towering cu formed but eventually dissipated), or (3) intercept another MCS forming in elevated air across northeast IA. Well, option (3) was it once I determined the storms from option (1) were not looking good on radar (outflow dominant) and option (2) was squelched by a cap, meager convergence, and lackluster sb-CAPE. Option (3) afforded me the opportunity to sit down and have a nice Chick-fil-a dinner while awaiting the MCS to my north. After dinner complete with a Polynesian-Chick-fil-a sauce mix, I slid east to Port Byron along the Mississippi River, where I setup for some timelapse of the oncoming shelf. Boy, this shelf did not disappoint! It was spectacular and even featured a unique rainbow along the entire horizontal length of the shelf (a bit hard to discern in the photos/gif animations, but hopefully you can see it). Scooted east out of town as the thing ran over the top of me ... the race was on. I let it tail me all the way to Sheffield, IL, where I finally called it a chase and headed home to DeKalb. I'm not overly fond of MCS chasing (dominant storm morphology we get across the Midwest in the summer), but this storm was quite picturesque.

Shelf rears its head on the Ol' Miss-- oh, you should've seen the boaters squirm! BTW, Port Byron sounded their sirens despite no tor-warn. Actually, a lot of towns I traversed this evening sounded sirens.

Shelf approaches Port Byron. The crossing sign you see there must've been blown down by the first MCS of the day. In fact, crews were repairing felled power poles in town as I was looking for a place to setup shop.

Panoramic of shelf over the Mississippi River.

I have a number of gif animations, but I'll only provide one within the blog below so as not to overload those with slow connections. Those that are interested, can view the other gif animations via this directory.

Port Byron shelf. Can you see that rainbow effect within the shelf? Not sure the camera (or my amateur photography) does it justice. Twas cool.

I hope to update with some timelapse video in the near future ... check back in a few days.

6/17/2010 - Northwest Iowa Storms

Frustrating day as I apparently missed Ma' Nature's target for the day -- she forgot to let me in on her secret. I left DeKalb around 7:30 am and targeted the area of nw IA around Storm Lake. I arrived with plenty of CAPE, 200+ m2/s2 of SRH, and a focused supercell composite maximum, yet ended up with nothing more than storms that crapped out on me early on and reformed later into a line with only transient mesocyclones (albeit, tor warned). The main show occurred over the border in MN near the I-35 and I-90 interchange. Once I realized that these initially crappy storms well ahead of the cold front were going to be the main show, it was too late. I'm still not sure why the initial storms I was on near Storm Lake didn't go crazy considering the environment they were in, but my assumption is that mixing was simply a bit too much for the early on convection and pressure falls to the north killed the directional shear for the later storms. Anyway, I was treated to a couple of wrapped up mesos along the line and then, later, a whale's mouth that tried to munch me.

Member of the second round of storms that formed into a line, which had transient supercellular structure/mesocyclones. These were tor-warned, but quickly became undercut each time they'd wrap up.

Late evening storm near Algona, IA, which produced quite a bit of nontornadic wind damage in town.

Another view of a wrap-up to the northeast of Algona, but clearly outflow dominant.

Twilight whale's mouth in Clear Lake, IA -- nothing more frustrating than stop lights and traffic when you have a storm moving at you at 55 mph.

Amazing whale's mouth perspective as I hop on I-35 south.

6/12/2010 - Morning Microburst and Evening Lake Breeze Boundary

Though Saturday didn't feature a tornadic supercell in Illinois, I was treated to a couple of unique weather opportunities. The first was a quick "chase" to intercept an early morning MCS moving into north-central Illinois. This MCS featured a wet microburst in the Lee and DeKalb areas. The video below illustrates the blinding rain with sustained severe winds just east of Paw Paw.

Video of the wet microburst during the morning.

Radar grab of the MCS that produced the damaging wind reports.

On the way back from the grocery store later Saturday afternoon, I noticed an interesting "shelf" cloud formation over the DeKalb "skyline". After a brief data check at home, it was obvious a lake breeze had made it all the way to DeKalb County. Though lake breezes are common in the Chicago and 'burbs regions, they rarely make it out here to any substantive degree. In addition, they are rarely "marked" by such a cool cloud formation. I was quite surprised that the breeze had progressed this far westward, especially considering two eastward moving MCSs had moved through the Chicago area that day. I ventured to the wind farm south of Malta where I snapped some pics and took in a bit of time lapse of the boundary as it approached. Below is some imagery from this unique weather treat.

KLOT base reflectivity loop, which illustrates an MCS across Indiana and a radar fine line (i.e., the lake breeze boundary) moving across northeast Illinois.

Panoramic of lake breeze boundary. A much larger image ... and second ... are available for download. Browsers won't support such large images usually, so you'll have to download then view if interested.

Gif animation of stills as lake breeze boundary approaches.

Gif animation of stills as lake breeze boundary passes.

Time lapse of the boundary.

6/5/2010 - West-central IL Supercell and Tornadoes

Saturday was one of those hurry up and wait days. We left Kansas City at 9 am and targeted the southeast Iowa region for initiation that afternoon. We traversed I-35 and then the US-34 corridor (US-34 west of Ottumwa is nasty chasing terrain and has road work/bridge out issues -- stay away chasers!) to the Ottumwa, IA area where we, once again, chowed down on some fast food. I was able to grab some good internet at Arby's (we'd been fighting slow mobile internet all trip) and decided to move east toward Mt. Pleasant, IA after lunch. This area was in a bit of a bubble high from morning convection and was experiencing increasing theta-e with moisture pooling and warming due to clearing (Tds got up to 77 in Mt. Pleasant! Ugh -- it felt like a sauna). I didn't want to play the convection along the cold front to the northwest -- it honestly didn't look like anything substantial. Albeit, I was concerned that the area of southeast Iowa wouldn't initiate and we'd miss the show to the northwest. We stuck to our target area and waited, and waited, and waited. We spent a couple hours in a park in Mt. Pleasant, once taking a break from the extreme humidity to grab some frozen treats in town. Sometime around 6 or so (I'm losing track of the exact time) some showers grew out of a strato-cu field stretching across southeast Iowa. We experienced the first drops of the eventual Illinois tornadic storm as we finished up water balloon launching in a park in Mt. Pleasant. We soon loaded the vans and scooted east toward Burlington, IA, where the shower took on a more impressive radar signature. As the storm moved into Illinois, it was like a switch was turned on and the thing ramped up in organization as it hit a pool of great low-level shear. Despite a meager radar reflectivity pattern, the low-level velocity signature tightened rapidly over the Monmouth to Abindon, IL area. Visually, the thing was looking great and started to take on that "I'm gonna do it" appearance. Sure enough, as it neared Yates City, it dropped what appeared to be a fairly strong tornado (later confirmed as EF2; though I have my suspicions that winds were much higher, but such are the pitfalls of a damage scale). We watched as the tornado raced east across Yates City and then into Elmwood. It was a scary scene -- we were horrified as debris was lofted in and around these towns. We are thankful that no one was seriously injured. After viewing the tornado move east out of Elmwood, we hopped in the vans and screamed east after the fast moving storm. The Elmwood tornado lifted, but it soon dropped another multi-vortex/merry-go-round tornado east of Elmwood. Again, this tornado lifted after about 5 minutes and we then saw another tornado north of Hanna City. Navigation became a nightmare due to the Peoria metro area as the sun was setting (as well as a plethora of local yahoos), but we did watch the storm occlude, producing a dramatic wall and rotating rain curtains in the immediate northwest Peoria region -- we were situated along I-474. As the occluded wall moved northeast we witnessed a new wall to our immediate east as we headed down I-74. This wall cloud went directly over Peoria -- thankfully, it didn't "produce". We ended the night with a bit of "what was that under the wall cloud" chasing east of Peoria. Overnighted in Normal. We slept in on Sunday, moseyed across the Streator and DeWight tornado damage paths, before making it back to College of DuPage about 3:30 pm. An exhilarating 10 days with some great people! Thanks to drivers Joe and Leon, as well as Matt for assisting.

Touchdown west of Yates City ... as caught by COD Trip 3 participant Matt Gillen.

One of those yowzer pics ... I was hoping I got one as I was snapping like crazy, and I was lucky I did. I only wish I had the time to tripod it.

Tornado tearing through Elmwood -- amazing shot by Matt.

Debris shot by Matt Gillen.

COD Trip 3 participant Cody Folz captured this debris-filled pic.

One of the more amazing pics of the trip, as caught by Cody.

COD Trip 3 participant Clark Thorne's video of the tornado as it moves from Yates City toward Elmwood, IL. Sorry, but video compression stinks on Google.

6/3/2010 - Northeast Nebraska Storm

Thursday was a bit frustrating initially since our target area near Chamberlain, SD didn't "go" -- we suppose due to reduced heating thanks to thick cirrus canopy. However, during the late evening, we were rewarded with a dramatic shelf cloud along the southeast and east edge of a outflow dominant supercell near Niobrara, NE. Despite having to navigate around a few hail cores and dealing with construction-induced route changes in South Dakota, we eventually made it south of the Missouri River into Nebraska where we were literally chased by a surging supercell that quickly transitioned into a mini-bow echo. It tailed us at what appeared to be about 55-65 mph, but we were afforded a couple opportunities to stop, jump out, and grab some pics. The shelf was rather dramatic in the late evening light, emanating a beautiful turquoise along and within its laminar front. In addition, while driving east ahead of the surging cold pool, we witnessed a neat kink form along the shelf. The kink rotated like crazy at cloud-base level and even had a good bit of dust concentrated under it -- thought for a second, we may witness one of those bottom-up tornadoes. Alas, it never appeared to strengthen enough to produce. Overnighting in Norfolk, NE.

Panoramic shot east of Niobrara, NE.

Cool kink that formed and rotated as we raced east.

Shelf as it crossed north of us at twilight east of Hartington, NE.

Yet another perspective, looking north-northeast.

6/2/2010 - Colby Supercell

Wednesday featured two marginal severe targets: 1) southeast Colorado to the Texas panhandle or 2) northeast Colorado, northwest Kansas, into southwestern Nebraska. We initially chose target (1), but during our westbound drive, we decided to go for (2) based on new (12z) model output and analysis. We eventually made it to Colby, where we chowed down on some lunch at Montana Mike’s while keeping a radar eye on a storm northwest of Ogallala. After lunch, we ventured north to the Wallace and Dikins, NE region, where we intercepted a decaying storm. We then shot south where we gassed up in McCook and turned our eyes to a storm developing and strengthening in the Benkelman, NE area. We intercepted this picturesque, high-based supercell south of Atwood, and again east of Colby. As you can see below, the storm featured modest mid-level rotation. It was a nice treat for such a marginal day. Ended the night with drive to McCook for dinner and, eventually, North Platte for our 3rd LBF Holiday Inn Express experience of this trip.

Not the kind of tube we were lookin' for.

First storm that gusted out once we got to it.

Colby Supercell.

Storm as it nears Colby.

Time lapse of the storm north and then east of Colby.