On May 23rd 2020, I went on my first storm chasing trip not expecting much other then maybe some rain and hail, and at best a decent picture of the structure of a mature supercell. What I got may not seem like much to most people but to me, it was an amazing experience. I got to see the birth of tornado albeit a weak one, likely an EFO on the Enhanced Fujita Scale but still an mesmerizing image in my mind.
I originally hadn't planned on chasing on Saturday for a few reasons. These include being slightly worried about the whole Coronavirus situation and how Illinois was still a hotspot for the virus. I also wasn't going to go because I never trust warm front situations in Illinois because more often than not, they don't pan out. March 28 2020 is a prime example of this occurring when SPC issued a MDT risk for Northern Illinois, but convection over Missouri overnight ruined the whole setup. The last reason why I wasn't going to chase was because I had no experience prior to this chasing and to be frank I'm a cautious guy so I didn't really want to chase unless it was a home-run setup and an enhanced risk with a 10% tornado probability doesn't necessarily shout home-run for a newbie like me.
That all changed on Saturday morning when I awoke and had a gut feeling about chasing today and decided to see the feasibility of whether or not it was worth it. I already knew that my good friend Isaac Schluesche (@SlushyWx on twitter) was going to be chasing because he had told me the night before and I thought to myself that "If he thinks the setup is good enough to chase maybe I should look into it" I had major doubts like my aforementioned thinking about Northern Illinois setups. When I woke up I looked at model runs and current observations and they looked very enticing, the warm front was advancing nicely through central Illinois at the time with temperatures around 70 and dew points ranging from 60 to 65. SPC had issued an Enhanced risk for Northern Illinois with a 10% risk for tornadoes earlier that morning as well. So I decided that I would chase if my dad wasn't too busy and could help with the driving, and lo and behold he agreed to come with, so I was on my way to my first chase.
After doing some personal stuff that morning, I started to plan my route and I decided that my dad and me would head west to the I-39/I-80 intersection near Peru Illinois. This would give us good North/South and East/West access depending on where and when storms would fire so I could get there in time. I also choose that area because the town offered some decent food options if we were hungry and had some spare time on our hands. While on route, the SPC issued a Tornado Watch for much of the area with a 70% chance of tornadoes which helped to bolster the case to chase today. We left home around 11:30 and had a just under 2 hour drive there which was pretty uneventful, just some hit some rain showers as we pulled up to Peru where we decided to eat at a place called John's Place which had some very good sandwiches. While we waited for our food I decided to reassess the situation and it seems as though I was in no man's land with storms to my north and to my south. I decided to head North towards Rochelle to get some cheaper gas as well as to target some developing cells 20-30 miles to the northwest which showed some promise.
On the way north towards Rochelle, cell that once showed promised started to fizzle out even though it had decent CAPE, SRH and it was discrete as it was the only supercell within 50 miles of it. When I got to the gas station I had to assess what and where we should go. There were two options on the table at the time, head N towards preexisting cells heading NE towards the Illinois/Wisconsin border, one of which was tornado warned or head west towards developing cells near Walnut Illinois. With some guidance from some of my friends and other storm chasers in a group chat I was in, I decided to take a bit of a riskier path in heading west towards cells that were just developing but had a high chance of having the same fate as the cell prior to these in the same area. Rather than chasing fast moving cells into Wisconsin, I'd rather have the storms come to me so that I could better position myself to get a better view of the Supercell.
As it turns out, luck and good intuition was on my side as it turns out that that storm NW of Rockford almost dropped a tornado multiple times but never was able to completely complete the job as I learned later that night from Isaac. While that was occuring, the cells to my SW were quickly organizing and my dad and I decided to stop near the town of Chana and wait for the Supercells to move to the NE near our position. The first one showed decent rotation on radar but since the radar site was some distance away, the rotation looked quite broad. In addition, to that, what we were seeing with our eyes didn't look too enticing. That being said, since I'm a new guy to chasing I don't really know what looks good and what looks bad, I was only guessing at the time.
It was about 4:10 when I could see slight rotation of a small wall cloud in the distance which piqued my interest in the cell. As it came closer the rotation became more evident with multiple scud clouds becoming evident as well as general updrafts. As it moved to the NE the wall cloud began to lower which was a really good sign that this cell may produce a twister.
As the supercell continued to move to the NE, it crossed the road and this is when I started to see what appeared to look like a horizontal tube originating from the wall cloud. It eventually became vertically stacked and that is when the funnel cloud emerged. At this point I was geeking out from my vantage point about seeing a funnel cloud. At this time I couldn't see if the there was any debris at the ground because a house blocked my view which would indicate that the tornado extended to the ground but the condensation funnel didn't reach all the way down. However as it continued the funnel became better organized and continue to lower from the initial wall cloud.
After the funnel cloud moved bit further to my right to the point where I could see it without obstruction, I finally got a good look at it, it wasn't nothing too spectacular to most chasers but to me, it was entracing. I couldn't keep my eyes off of it. It was another 2-3 minutes later of the funnel cloud moving to the NE is when I could actually confirm that this was in fact an actual twister and not just a funnel cloud. Just behind a tree line in the distance I could see what appeared to be dirt/dust and leaves be blown off in the distance under the funnel cloud which confirmed the Tornado status to me at least. I say that because as of May 25th while I'm writing this post, NWS Chicago hasn't officially confirmed the twister but mentioned that a quick spin up was possible.
I can't post the actual video on weebly, but if you click on the link below, it should bring up my twitter where I posted the video where you can see the Tornado with some brief debris in the distance.
https://twitter.com/ReaperofCanada/status/1264321193890459649
A couple minutes after I recorded that video, the funnel cloud retracted and all there was a wall cloud whose structure was rapidly deteriorating as it moved away from me. My dad and I decided to follow it for the next 30 minutes to see if anything would happen but the wall cloud by that point was just hidden in rain and the rotation on radar was nothing more, so my dad and I decided to head home at that point around 6. While on the way back we drove through the "Hail Core" of a storm and while there wasn't any hail associated with it, the rain was so heavy we could barely see 50 feet in front of us on the highway. What a way to end the trip.
All in all 300 miles, about 7 hours and 1 tornado on a trip that I had no expectations was more than worth it. It was very successful first storm chasing experience and now that I've broken the ice, I'm going to attempt to chase more from here on out in my area. A lot of credit goes to my friend Isaac as well as Erik, Nick and Logan who helped with tips throughout the whole trip.
My next blog post will be my forecast for the Atlantic Hurricane Season which will come out in the coming week.
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Welcome to the Website, I will be occasionally writing about interesting weather events, seasonal forecasts and anything else weather related. The site is currently still a work in progress so what is seen and what will be here will change. For now I have put the basics, some quick links to some important pages as well some cool photos I've taken throughout the years. I thought I might write about something interesting today as a a day one special, however, they aren't that many interesting weather events currently going on. Instead, I'll just show off the graph I made yesterday night on Hurricane ACE from 1950 till today and talk about it. Here we can see the hurricane ACE of each individual season in blue and the 5 and 10 year moving average in red and yellow respectively. There are a few things that come to mind when looking at this chart. First of all we can see active periods and the inactive periods quite easily when looking at the moving averages. We can see that both the 5 and 10 moving averages went below 100 for most of the 70s and 80s denoting an inactive/cold period for the Atlantic. On the flip side we see that in the 50s/60s as well as since the mid 90s it has been mostly above 100. This coincides nicely with what we saw in 1995 when the Hurricane ACE was over 200 which corresponded with beginning of the current active period. Something to note is that numbers in the 50s and 60s may be a little lower than what they actually represent due to underreporting due to the lack of proper satellite imagery and some cases the complete lack of imagery. So that means the numbers prior to 1970 may be higher than what the graph shows. CSU released their April Prediction for the upcoming Hurricane season and they're predicting that we should quite active season ahead with ACE around 150 which would more than what we saw in the last two years. They are predicting for 16 named storms, 8 Hurricanes, and 4 Major Hurricanes this season. The average for each of those values are 12 named storms, 6 Hurricanes, and 3 Major Hurricanes for a normal season. My own prediction is somewhere in the range of 14-18 Named Storms, 7-10 Hurricanes and 3-5 Major Hurricanes, which is fairly similar to what CSU has predicted. I may make my own forecast in the coming future so stay tune for that in future blog posts.
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AuthorHello, my name is Kaylan. I'm currently a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin studying Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. I have had a passion in the weather for as long as I can remember and hope to continue it into the future. Archives
December 2020
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