08/13/07 REPORTS: ND / MN / WI

[Andrew Pritchard]

I debated over and over whether or not to make the trip from where I was vacationing in central Wisconsin. I knew the cap was probably going to hold but with class and work resuming in a week I don't know when I'll be really free again so I went for it anyway. Well, I made it as far as St. Cloud and decided I wasn't going any further as there wasn't even so much as a good cu field going up. Only extremely elevated showers. I could see the anvil from the supercell to my north but shrugged it off since it was over worse terrain. Around 7 I decided I wanted to get an early start on the drive back to Wisconsin since I was about 5 hours out. However, I couldn't stop glancing down and seeing how intense that beast looked to my north. I stopped again about 10 miles down the road on Highway 10 and took a closer look. Since I had about an hour before dark and the storm was only 40 minutes away I went for it. It was clearly outflow dominant but after driving that far I wanted at least something to show for it.

I wound up intercepting southeast of Foley about 15 miles. There was decent structure from a distance, but once I got closer it was pretty mushy looking. Kinda odd, the big bow echo Saturday nite and then this thing had major winds, but no shelf cloud at all really like you'd expect.

Anyway, it started as some blowing dust and the low growl of the wind through the power lines. I had tried to locate a small town to take some sort of cover in, but had to settle for pulling off near a little farmstead.

That's when things went nuts. I'm not sure why I under estimated the strength of a storm with a 75 dbz core, but I did. I guess I just need excitement. I can't sit back and watch a storm, I need to know what is going on inside. So if the tornado threat seems diminished, I'll usually take a walk through the core (incase any watching spotter network wondered if I was blind or something).

It hit like a brick wall. One minute I'm watching light rain blown by 40 mph winds and the next I'm watching crap fly by my windshield. The video of this is pretty intense, though not as good as being there, but visibility was terrible with the low light and blinding rains so it was hard to see much detail in person anyway. Looking out my drivers side window there was all kinds of crap, probably parts of trees and such flying through the air over my car, out the windshield I could see branches and other small items flying down the road across my headlights, and my passenger side window was useless because the winds and hail had plastered all kinds of junk to it. There are still leaves stuck in places out there.

Was hard to say how large the hail was, but the winds driving it into my windows was deafening. I was actually somewhat concerned I'd crack a window, not so much because of the size, but speed it was hitting. I didn't remember looking when I pulled in at what kinds of things were to my north where the wind was coming, so I was kind of concerned what kind of crap might be flying towards me. It's hard estimating wind speeds in such bad visibility, but I've seen a ton of straight line wind events, and this topped them all. I've never been scared before from just wind, but this had me shaking. I think it was Mike Hollingshead who said something similar to how I felt earlier during one of his experiences that if it was already this bad, how much worse is it going to get. I started to think maybe I had made a poor choice. At one point I even started wondering if there was a freaking tornado near me with all the debris in the air. I had shut off my lap top to give my car a break so I didn't know if maybe a circulation had spun up. Obviously that wasn't the case, but it was just one of those 'holy crap' experiences. I put the winds yesterday between 80-90 mph. It let up a little so I decided I needed to make my way to the highway about 1/2 mile up the gravel road I was on. Luckily nothing was blocking the road, but the farm I was next to lost some trees.

Once I reached the highway it got a second wind. This time the winds weren't quite as strong, but still easily severe levels. The hail was much more intense this time. Pieces were around an inch in diameter, and were falling hard enough to start accumulating on the road next to me. This one lasted a few minutes before letting up.

The bow continued SE toward MSP and blocked my normal route back so I had to take 35 south to 90 and back over. I still didn't make it though and got cored by the second bow echo near Rochester. I pulled over rather than driving in it but it had weakened substantially. I was extremely tired now since it was almost 2, and I still had an hour to go so I just got back on the road driving behind the intense part of the bow all the way back, arriving around 3:30.

I know this log is no real good without video, so I'll put up some video clips (can't give it all away... buy/trade the dvd in a month! )
Hopefully it gives an idea of how intense it was... visibility was just terrible though so it was hard to capture all the junk flying around.

Ah well, not worth the 15 hour chase but at least it eased the pain of the cap bust further south.

 

[Bill Doms]

Not much to add. It was windy. Really windy. Things got a little more interesting as we approached Elk River from the northwest as the cell went torn warned but the good old sandhills (yes, there are sandhills here, but they are covered in TREES) kept us from getting closer or to a better viewing area into the short lived notch.

More pics here:
http://www.mnwxchaser.com/07august13.html

Pretty sure this is what Andrew was sitting under around Foley MN.

 

[Andrew Pritchard]

Well, here's a couple clips from the video. There is plenty more, but wanted to throw a little something online. The rest will be on the dvd in the fall, for those interested... There, I said it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5rpIg9R0p7k

Interesting Bill posted the shot of the little notch there. I threw a part on at the end where I noted an instant switch of the winds from the northwest, to straight out of the east.

 

[Doug_Kiesling]

Minneapolis Metro area from 8/13/07

Ok, just getting caught up with stuff here and posting the video from the Monday night.

I was watching the setup all day and it looked like a late evening and overnight mcs event in the making so I did not buy the hype of the super tornado day.

Since I have been doing a lot of bridge collapse aftermath work up here in Minneapolis, the big story was the heavy rain and rising Mississippi River levels. So I wanted to stay closer to home for this setup. So after watching the first wave of storms that Bill and Al were on pass by the north metro after dark, I setup in downtown Minneapolis to get some sweet timelapse of the second storm system moving into the heart of the metro.

The lightning was cool but was better on the back side of the storm. The hail was small and was more like sleet but still cool to be in the heart of the metro with small hail. But the flooding was insane. I was catching several storm drains backing up and shooting water into the air. Then right after the storm hit, I was out on the south side of town to document the extreme flooding on Interstate 494 at 12th Avenue.

What was the crazy event of the night was not the down town flooding or the 494 flooding but the flooding over the Minnesota River Cedar Avenue Bridge or the Highway 77 bridge. This bridge is about 35 feet above the river and ground below and was flooded. But this was not flooding from the river but the storm drains being clogged and trapping the rain water on the bridge itself.

Here is the video I posted to YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw_KhZpPawc

 

[Chris White]

I headed to Sauk Center, MN in the afternoon, had some cells trying to get going just NW(a couple miles) of me unable to get going, a couple of lightning strikes. The big cell to my North was in tree land so I mostly ignored it initialy dispite the urging of some others, it had a very Easterly direction at that time (ESE). Conditions were ripe just SW of me as well SE Minnesota (out of range) of me RUC was saying CAP was gone first in SW MN on one run which I believe was under a TOR Watch shortly later, followed by the SW corner of MN. I figured cells would fire on a line along the big one to the North, given the speed of the cell I figured the only way to keep up was to hop back onto I-94 and try and keep up and intercept near St. Cloud(as I noticed a Southerly shift in it's direction) if nothing else developed. I intercepted the cell near St. Cloud, and took Highway 10 to Elk River stopping just before Hwy 10 turns East afraid of getting cored. At this point I stopped and it was getting fairly dark, a TOR warning was issued around this point briefly.

I did'nt get any decent photos but, do have a complete report and brief video here. A not so good shot of the cell to the North that I eventually intercepted near St. Cloud;