We started the day around 3:30pm on the Green/Dane/Rock county line area as that seemed to be the area of highest instability according to meso analysis. A few high based storms did start to pop up shortly there after and quickly die kicking out some gusty winds of maybe 40mph, but some of the lightning was pretty vivid. After watching this happen several times, eventually 2 storms got going and held together for a bit longer than the previous others, the only problem was 1 storm was north and one was south and both had decent cores on them. We decided to take the storm to the north since it was not gonna run over any previous rain cooled air, and at the time that seemed like the best possible play.
(C) Jason Schwartzlow
We stuck with this storm, which was moving at a snails pace, for about 45 minutes watching it spit out brief pea size hail and lower end gusty winds. When we arrived with the storm to the interstate the storm that we were on had weakened quite a bit and the storm we had passed on to the south had actually grown quite considerably in size and had some pretty decent amounts of lightning with it now. We decided to abandon the storm we were on and fly south to near Janesville (My hometown) and see if we could get ahead of it before it came over the city. As we drove down the interstate the amount of lightning strikes around us was surprisingly large, but the one thing this storm was lacking despite a stronger DBZ core was any precip. Something at the time I found to be quite odd. As we arrived just north of town several of the cars in front of us began to brake rapidly, figuring there was an accident ahead at the time. When we got a little bit closer we got a glimpse of what exactly was causing the cars to stop and pull over.
A fairly large gustnado and trailing dust storm were crossing the interstate right in front of us, being right next to an off ramp we decided to get off of the exit and go get a closer look into this. As we crosssd the off interstate on the bridge we got a great view of the gustnado crossing the highway.
Now up until this moment I've never seen anything like this, so you can imagine my amazement at the time. We decided to race southeast more and get back ahead of the outflow from this storm and see if it would do the same thing again. When we finally did get back ahead of it the next few minutes really became a little bit intense, the only words I can remember Jason saying were "there is a huge rotation right behind us" With that sentence we quickly pulled over to a side road an I was able to open my door quick enough to see the rotation making a dead aim for us.
I was able to snap off 2 quick pictures right before it ran over us, the second one is zoomed on the right showing the branches, corn stalks and dust it was churning across the field at us. I got back in quick and had to roll my window up, something I didn't quite get all the way to in time (I'm still cleaning dirt/corn stalks out of my stuff) The feeling when the gustnado hit the car was rather eary, it almost felt like it grabbed the car and was shaking it from side to side, we estimated the winds in it to be around 60-70mph. After it had passed the thing just kept spinning away in the field next to us giving us a great view of it up close.
(C) Jason Schwatzlow
Soon after this the storm had weakened quite a bit and we decided to just let it go on its way, after the storm had fully passed we were treated to a pretty awesome looking sky with some mammatus and a neat rainbow.
All in all it turned into a decent day being able to experience that for the 1st time, just goes to show even outflow can be fun sometimes ;)
A short while after this another gustnado had done some damage to a house in southeastern Wisconsin and a news station (WISN in Milwaukee) did a story regarding gustnadoes and what causes them and used my video footage from that day in the story.
My full video can be seen here. Thank y'all for taking the time to read, hope you enjoyed it!
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