One Hail of a Day 5-20-2014

Tuesday May 20th was a rather questionable severe weather day, with a weak cold front dropping southeast and a pretty moist air mass forecasted there was a chance at a few severe thunderstorms to pop up, but the question remained if a shortwave would show up in time to trigger any storms before sunset. A slight risk was issued for far southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for the potential of some pretty large hail and possibly a few tornadoes.

 

 

 

Being it as local as it was there was no way to pass up chasing it, at worst we would see lightning at sunset. The plan was for Jason and I to meet up after I got done with work at 4pm, we would also be joined by Mike Abernethy. Our initial idea was to just drift west and wait for storms to pop up along the front and go from there, a few models did hint at storms popping up further to the south but where it was gonna happen was the question. a little before 4 a severe thunderstorm watch was issued for the immediate area and it looked like storms would be soon to follow.

Much to my frustration storms did indeed start to form south of my original thinking and we would now need to plan a different route. We set sail on I-39 south with the intention of heading west on highway 20 in northern Illinois to reach a line of supercells that had rapidly formed from around Mt Carroll Illinois back to Dubuque. After making our turn west we got caught in standstill traffic and had to detour south to get out of the traffic and then make our way back west. While having a little bit of difficulty getting on a decent road back west, it became apparent that these supercells were moving very slow and not showing much sign of converging into a line as we also once thought. While making our way west a little rain shower popped up with lightning just to our west, in all honestly it looked like a very disorganized blob for a couple scans. While watching the updraft from this storm tighten right up it became apparent that this little cell was trying, on the very next scan it was a full blown supercell that would quickly go warned for large hail, chase on!

We had to make a short little trip south through the core of this storm to get to the south end and into better viewing position, while doing this we missed the hail core by seconds but a we would soon see some large hail covering the ground and some pretty extensive tree damage from the hail. We stopped for a few pictures of some of the hail stones and found most of them to be ping pong size to golf ball size.

After several minutes had passes the storm had moved well east of us and we decided to let it go as it was about to converge with another cell and was starting to weaken, but the structure on the backside filled with constant flashes of lightning was a beautiful sight to watch.

As this storm passed us we now had to make a decision, call it a chase and head home or wait out several more storms in Iowa slowly heading in our direction. After some thought we decided to keep after it. we slowly started to work our way back west to get into position for a beautiful supercell coming out of Iowa and into northern Illinois. With sunset quickly approaching though we were forces with the decision of just how far west we wanted to go, chasing in northwest Illinois is challenging enough, let alone doing it in the dark. The best possible spot looked to be just west of Byron, we could cross the river and get back out into open country and await the arrival of the next round. While making our way west we were treated to another storm that quickly went severe but weakened just as quick. It did although have some nice lightning with it for us to view with a beautiful colored sky in the backdrop.

After this storm had died and the sun quickly set, we now played the waiting game. After about 45 minutes, a fight with a foggy river valley and a difficult time finding a shootable spot we settled on an area overlooking the western horizon, the only problem is our once beautiful storm was weakening and was now not even warned. After another 15 minutes or so the storm once again rapidly intensified and was heading right at us. We got the tripods and cameras set up and anxiously awaited our chance at some lightning. In just a matter of a few minutes the storm had went from a weakening stage back to a full blow severe storm that quickly went severe warned again, this time for more golf ball size hail. After watching the flashes and anvil crawlers across the sky for several minutes, we were treated to a lightning barrage like I have never seen before, there was non stop strikes for 5 minutes, one right after another.

After this round we called it a chase, the trip home was filled with flashes of lightning all around and stories of past chases as well as some amazing stories of Mikes medical adventures. A truly all around awesome chase!

 

Mike Abernethy is a physician for UW Med Flight in Madison, like them on Facebook for some amazing stories and pictures from the sky https://www.facebook.com/uwmedflight

 

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Thank you all for taking the time to read, until next time :)

 

Western Illinois Squeeze Play

Monday 4-28 brought us to western Illinois where the "squeeze play" term is one I like to use for a setup like this, you drive about 20 miles south of the warm front and hope like hell the storms can produce a tornado before it crosses that boundary. The setup looked very promising that morning, with a warm front draped from about Galesburg, Illinois to the southeast and strong low pressure in far eastern Nebraska with an approaching cold front.

That morning everything seemed to be coming together nicely for a few supercells that could produce tornadoes, with a peak to visible satellite in that area, skies seemed to be clearing and destabilizing nicely After reviewing a few things we set our target to Macomb, Ill. When we hit the road the temps were in the high 40s in southern Wisconsin, as we made our way to the Quad cities and south on I-74 the temperature slowly began to rise and skies were clearing. When we finally crossed the warm front the temp shot up to near 75F and the dewpoints into the low 60s. After looking at radar and satellite for a bit, it looked like the arc of cumulus would ignite storms in Iowa across the river, with very limited river crossings we did not want to take that risk so we decided to play it out in hopes storms would fire on our side of the river.  After watching several towers trying to go up and not surviving long, one to our southwest seemed to stay pretty persistent and was now showing some decent amounts of lightning on radar so we decided to give this cell a shot.  We met with this cell on a rural highway west of Macomb and was surprised at the constant rumble of thunder it had with it, while trying to get into a better position to view, we chose a road that was, well absolutely terrible! (see video)

After quickly making our way back to the main road we caught back up with this cell that had one of the weirdest yellow looking cores I have ever seen along with some beautiful intercloud lightning.

 

While watching this in amazement for awhile, the storm started to slowly drift off to our north so we had to reposition and quickly catch back up to it on rural gravel roads. After catching back up to the storm it seemed to be taking on supercell type characteristics and looked like it was developing a wall cloud with a classic clear slot punching in from the right side.

 

After several minutes of trying to organize into a nice supercell, the storm was quickly merging with other storms and becoming more outflow type storms with bowing segments, a sign that the threat for tornadoes was quickly reducing. We decided to abandon this cell after awhile and position ourselves in front of a little bowing segment that looked very beefy on radar. After finding a gravel road with a great view the storm was coming into view on the horizon and a beautiful shelf was emerging.

 

 

The green core and beautiful structure made for a few beautiful pictures. After getting back ahead of this cell on the highway it was rotating like a top on the leading edge right behind us but would never quite survive the battle with crossing the boundary into stable air. We soon decided to call it a day and head north towards home where we enjoyed a great lightning display to keep us entertained for awhile. Although no tornadoes this tie, we did have several laughs and see some great stuff. Until next time, thank you for coming along for the journey :)

 

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