8/23/2011 - Morning Shelf

Another shelf cloud made an appearance in DeKalb early Tuesday morning. This one was particularly pretty; featuring a lot of laminar layers with embedded folds along the edges. The early morning MCS was responsible for another 1.25-1.5" across the region, but featured little in the way of damaging winds or hail. Below is a panoramic stitch, a few stills, and an animated gif of the shelf as it moved across south DeKalb.

Actually a difficult stitch (of 4 images) to get since it was raining ahead of the shelf, which made for a few water splotches on a few other images.

Animated gif -- bounces around a bit since I had the tripod setup on the passenger seat in my car (to keep out of the rain).

8/13/2011 - DeKalb Area Storms

A plethora of unorganized, sub-severe storms moved across the DeKalb area on Saturday. I stepped away from a lazy Saturday at the house to capture a few of the storms in and around town. Below are a few stills, as well links to a number of gif animations.

 

Storms from NIU campus during the early afternoon: Animation 1, Animation 2 

Storms during the mid afternoon south of DeKalb: Animation 3, Animation 4 (above), Animation 5, Animation 6, Animation 7, Animation 8, Animation 9

8/12/2011 - Byron Storm

An interesting late afternoon jaunt up to the Byron-Stillman Valley area provided a much-needed late summer convective diversion. The target storm had already prompted a tornado warning in Ogle County; radar indicated steady, but fairly broad, rotation. Nevertheless, I hopped in the car and ran up I-39 and intercepted the mean looking storm just south of Stillman Valley. It was fun watching the cooling towers at Byron Nuclear Power Plant "assist" in the storm's condensation process. An area of pretty good low-level rotation was occurring to the northeast of the power plant at the interface of a very wet and hail-filled rear flank with a not-so-wet forward flank. Strong vertical motion was also evident near the circulation giving my heart reason to flutter for a few minutes. I could never see anything I'd consider a tornado, but it had me very interested for a bit -- you'll see below in one of the pictures why I was curious. Watched it dump a few cores in its forward flank before progressing east-southeast. I really wanted to get out and setup the tripod for an eventual timelapse, but the storm was spitting bolts all around me. So, I decided to live another day and forgo the outside-the-car shots. Not sure how I didn't come away with some good CG shots in the viewfinder. Oh well. Storm crapped out as it crossed into a more stable airmass east of I-39.

 Byron in background, with wall cloud and area of good rotation to the right.

Argh. Really wanted to lapse this view but simply couldn't due to the electricity. 

Yeah ... whatever that thing is. It was very interesting at this point, with strong rotation noted. I'm not sure what I was seeing as you really needed to be up in the notch a bit more for good viz. I'll just call it a blob.

Forward flank decides to drop some ice. Zeus must've been pissed b/c there were a ton of bolts at this time.

Equatorward flank gets "wet" again.

Opens up one last time before transitioning to crap.

Only bolt I got -- go figure, snagged it while driving 60 mph.

7/30/2011 - Green Bay decaying MCS

On the first day of our family vacation to the UP, we planned to visit Green Bay. As we ran up I-43, I could make out an anvil of to the northwest. Sure enough, as we neared Green Bay, t-storm warnings started to fly between Wausau and Green Bay.  I drove over to the Green Bay coastline near University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to setup shop -- hoping for a nice shelf.  Alas, as the storm neared, it was weakening quickly and had no sign of a good shelf.  Nevertheless, it was exhilarating as that wind came off the frictionless bay -- gusting to around 40 knots or so, I'd guess. A few images follow, but the most interesting stuff is in these three gif animations: timelapse 1, timelapse 2, timelapse 3.