Today started off as almost every typical severe weather day in the upper Midwest does...Left over crapvection from overnight storms that usually kill storm chances in the afternoon. On this particular day there was a pretty big MCS sitting in central Iowa and moving slowly east. towards our early target of around Sterling, Illinois. As the morning progressed into the early afternoon the MCS slowly started to weaken and kick out an outflow boundary right towards our target area. Visible satellite was also showing a very nice area of clearing Right between the I-88 and I-80 area. Jason Schwartzlow and I decided to continue on with our plans to chase in the sterling area and drop south if need be. As we approached Walnut Illinois a decent tower started to rapidly take shape as did features on radar. We decided to head east and take a peak at that storm for a little bit to see if it had any potential, As we approached the storm it seemed to have more and more CG strikes with it, witch is usually a sure sign of a rapidly intensifying storm. The only way to get to the southern side of the storm was to core punch it which is what we did. After some nickel size hail and a flooded road we emerged on the other side of the cell witch had a beautiful base on it and sucking in some great inflow.
At this exact point we lost Internet data and the storm went tornado warned. We knew the general direction and speed the storm was moving so we felt no really need to worry too much about not having internet, as we continued to move south and east we realized that we were certainly right in the bears cage of the storm as it was showing signs of rotation right above us.
As we approached the town of Princeton Illinois we were very surprised to see baseball games going on and no warning sirens sounding at all, even though the rotation from the storm was making a direct path for the city. As soon as we cleared Princeton we got the best view of the base of the storm that we had seen yet and thought it to be a pretty good chance of producing a tornado at any moment. The sky was darkening and turning a very greenish tint and an eery calm was in the air.
As we continued east/southeast it was becoming very apparent at this point that the storms were becoming very outflow dominant and starting to go linear so we stopped and took in some of the sights of the storm and we were soon greeted with one of the most amazingly odd shelf clouds I have ever seen.
The decision was made at this point to abandon the storms at I-39 and head north towards home but not before being blasted by wet RFD winds and some 1/2 dollar sized hail, we were also treated to an amazing lightning display as storms continued off to the east. Although we did not see a tornado this day, it was one of my most memorable chases that I will not soon forget.
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