March 15th 2016: An early Spring system was setting up again in the upper Midwest, the question would be where? Models indicated west central Illinois again as the potential target with deepening Low Pressure and some pretty good early season dynamics. The biggest question remained would be how much moisture was available.
Waking up Tuesday morning the day was starting to look like it could be a potentially big day, high resolution models painted a pretty good scenario for tornadic supercells and we agreed on our initial target of Macomb, Illinois. Home of Western Illinois University.
I decided to drive up to Jasons house in Edgerton around 9:30 Tuesday morning so we could set the car up and go over models, as well as wait for the 11:30 SPC update to read their thoughts on the rest of the day. When the update did come out were were happy to see our target area was now in an enhanced risk for severe thunderstorms along with a 10% tornado threat.
We left Edgerton around 11:45 fueled up and hit the road en route to Macomb. We arrived in Macomb a little after 2:00 and found a burger king parking lot to sit and wait in. While there an MD was posted by the SPC for a likely tornado watch with a tornado watch that soon followed with very surprising probabilities.
After sitting awhile the 1st few blips on the radar began to form and quickly strengthen...game on!
After watching these storms from a good distance we began to see a nice supercell take shape near Bentley, Illinois but was very disorganized at the moment. We continued to watch as this storm grew closer and closer.
After continuing to watch this storm develop for awhile storms behind it were being tornado warned and we at one point considered bailing on this storm and heading west, a decision we are glad we didn't make.
We stuck with the storm awhile and started getting dumped on with hail that was mainly dime and quarter size and decided we needed to get a little south into better position. While heading south next to the storm I made the remark "it looked very outflowish and crappy" something that would change rapidly in just 5 minutes. While stopping to get a quick look at what was going on right outside Good Hope we realized the storm was starting to wrap up and rotate heading right at us. We began bailing south while the storm began to wrap up tighter, soon after we saw the tell tale dust swirls in the field right next to us literally 100 yards away heading right at us, TORNADO!
This storm was not warned at the time so we made a quick phone call and got safely south and turned around to see the tornado cross the road right behind us along with a beautifully rotating meso/wall cloud.
We snapped some pictures and videos of the storm and the proceeded to follow the storm for several miles watching it kick up dust/dirt and a little debris intermittently. We lost the storm around St Augustine after being stuck behind emergency crews and getting hit hard with RFD.
After we got out of that mess we continued on towards Peoria where another storm was just going tornado warned where we battled wind blown hail and may have briefly caught a glimpse in the lightning flashes.
After losing sight of this feature we had lightning bolt after lightning bolt hitting all around us so we decided to stop and attempt some lightning pictures before making the 3 hour trek back north towards home.
This was the perfect end to a great day as we make the drive pack to Wisconsin. We arrived in Edgerton around midnight exhausted but excited for what had just happened that day.
The Good Hope tornado was officially rated an EF-2 tornado with a max with of 1800 yards (over 1 mile wide. Below is a timelapse video of the meso/wall cloud.
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Full Good Hope, Illinois wall cloud/tornado sequence time-lapse from my dash cam yesterday. It is hard to see the tornado, but the dust whirls are there.
Posted by Tom Purdy on Wednesday, March 16, 2016
