A couple of trends I've noticed with this chase season, on days where
there is only a very slight risk to almost no risk around
here...something happens....on the days where setups are more
favorable....nothing....that mother natures a tricky bitch I tell
ya.
The second would be the dates. Ive chased on May 5th, June 6th, and now August 5th. I'm starting to like the
beginnings of the months.
Anyways. I was keeping
an eye on the radars all day and saw nothing impressive so I decide
to go run an erand. I call a friend 10 minutes later and he says "guess
what theres a tornado warning." Well stupid Adam had his NOAA radio on
the wrong channel so that is why he didn't get the warning. Sure
enough a public report of a funnel cloud came in about 20 miles from home so I zoom home grab some of
my gear, toss it in the van and off I go. I left in such a hurry I
forgot my new anemometer which I have been waiting very impatiently to
test out in the field. DOH!
I leave and right away
see good structure and what looks to be a wall cloud.
I'm
not 100 percent sure of this, if it was indeed a wall cloud then it
fell apart and became detached from the base rather
quickly.
Needless
to say the backside of the storm had decent, solid isolated
structure. Somewhat rare around here. the c-rays looked
nice.
Well
chasing in the city sucks so I battled traffic for awhile and decided I
would shoot down on Harlem Ave as far as I could go. I never knew Harlem eventually
turned into a dirt farmland road.
A pretty nice
line has now formed and I was treated to some pea size hail, very heavy rains and
occasional wind gusts that would send leaves and sticks flying my
way.
That be some heavy rain in the
distance!
Well
3 more tornado warnings would come out of this line, all radar indicated
rotation. I could see rotation at one point but it didn't look
organized, still worth staying on though I pretty much followed it
till dark and when it started falling apart on radar I called it a
day. I decided to test my luck on lightning shots
again.
These
pics look nice on my digi cam, but on my PC they're dark as hell so I
don't know if its my PC or what.
I
could see allot of lowerings in between flashes but night-time
spotting is hard. On the way back I saw more tree limbs down, all the
towns were without power and there were a few flooded streets, They
were already mentioning them on the NOAA radio so I didn't call it
in.
Radar screen shot. I'm actually in a very bad position as far as viewing the storm
goes, but considering where I was coming from and the only roads were
dead end dirt ones I didn't have much choice.
SPC
storm reports, supposedly the funnel was spotted by an NWS employee and
theres some structural damage in Will County. It will be interesting to
see what comes from this and if anyone got any pics or
video.
Well
it was a last minute backyard chase, no tornado but I at least got to
hear the sirens. There was tons of lightning and some decent
structure/features. At this time in the year ill take what i can
get!!!
Miles: approx 100
Interesting fact
learned. Harlem ave ends as a muddy dirt road in the
farmlands.
Number of times I cursed my video camera for being
broken because the lightning was amazing: 23895773245
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