Wednesday May 29th 2013 was a very interesting setup across southwestern Wisconsin, a slight risk for severe storms was already in place as the day began.
The decision was made the night before to go ahead and give it a try as long as convection waited until I got of off work at 4pm. as the day progressed into the afternoon it was apparent that the storms would in fact wait until after I got off of work to progress into the area. In the early afternoon hours a severe thunderstorm watch was posted for southwest Wisconsin and Meso analysis models were showing some nice EHI or Energy rotating in around the Grant county area.
As the early afternoon progressed it seemed a somewhat tornadic threat was evolving along a line forming in eastern Iowa and heading into southwest Wisconsin. After getting off at work at 4 I met up with my chase partner Jason and tried to decide the best area to target, after briefly looking over things, we decided the best option we had was to head west on highway 12 to the Fennimore area. As we entered Grant county the weather radio went of and a tornado warning was issued for the general area we were heading to, with a little added excitement now we pressed west as fast as we could (or as fast as law allows)
As we approached this storm we realized that it was headed into very difficult terrain to chase so we decided to stay a little south of the storm in the more open area to get the best possible view. As we sat on an old country road watching the storm approach, it became apparent that we were in the best possible spot to see the structure of the storm approaching on the horizon. As the storm approached it kicked out a beautiful shelf with supercell like characteristics and Jason was able to snap this beautiful shot of it as it came across.
I was also able to get a nice panorama of the shelf coming across in front of us.
We then decided to head back east and try to stay ahead of it to see what it would do and try and get some more pics of it as it still looked healthy and beautiful. After traveling east quite a ways we were able to find and old road that gave us another beautiful view of the storm and it was still showing a nice shelf.
As we were finally overtaken by the shelf we were treated to one more beautiful feature from some of these storms knows as a whales mouth, Jason snapped this shot of it as we were under it.
After the storm had finally moved off to out northeast we decided that it was not worth going across the river after so we headed east towards home and saw little cells popping up ahead of the main line and start to shoot out some amazing lightning bolts, one of which was dang close to hitting a farmer out in his fields on his tractor. We stopped for a little bit to watch another cell and it started to kick out some beautiful lightning and I was able to capture this 1 shot as it neared.
After that light show our chase would end and we would set a course for home, but not before our 1st Wisconsin chase of 2013 showed us some beautiful sight of mother nature and reminded us how much we love weather! Here is the write up from the National weather service in Lacrosse http://www.crh.noaa.gov/arx/?n=may2913
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