2012-05-01 REPORTS: MN/SD

[Dean Baron]

Chased the warm front in Minnesota yesterday. Had a tough time deciding whether to go for the storms going up to my south in Wright county or to my west in Pope county. After watching the trends on radar for a while I finally committed to the storms to my west in Pope county. My air card and GPS were giving me problems all day, the air card wouldn't keep a connection and Streets and Trips crashed my laptop twice, then eventually stopped opening up all together. I ended up relying on my phone for navigation for a good part of the chase and only had intermittent data. I had to punch the core of the Pope county storm but luckily made it through in time to see the brief tornado. Wasn't able to get in real great position on the storm for most of the rest of the day, although I had a pretty good view of the wall cloud at it passed over St Cloud and to the east of town. Ran in to quite a bit of hail, although it was never anything big, mostly quarter size and smaller, although I'm sure there were a few bigger stones mixed in at some points.

Here is a pic of the funnel, the tornado was on the ground for a minute or two just kicking up some dust. Looking east, about a mile or two away from me:

The updraft of the storm not long after the tornado. The base was organizing again and looked like it was getting ready to produce again, but I lost visual due to navigation after this pic:

Video of the tornado. Around the 1:20-1:30 is when the dust starts to get kicked up. You actually have to kind of look for it to see it, the ground circulation was definitely not huge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP2rg9mIin8&feature=youtu.be

 

[Jenn Brindley]

Chased MN as well with Skip Talbot. We didn't get any tornadoes but had some beautiful, really photogenic storms. We were on three separate cells over the course of the day. Full blog post with more photos can be found here: http://www.faceofastorm.blogspot.com/2012/05/minnesota-chase-512012.html


Here are some of the images:

Full blog post with more photos can be found here: http://www.faceofastorm.blogspot.com/2012/05/minnesota-chase-512012.html

 

[Skip Talbot]

Here's the timelapsed footage from my chase with Jenn last Tuesday. Photogenic structure on two different storms in southwest Minnesota and a tornado warned storm at dusk in northwest Iowa:

Watch video >

On a side note, I had somebody come forward and tell me they phoned in a report of a rotating wall cloud to NWS Chanhassen based upon watching my live stream. At 16x speed you can see there isn't much rotation at all evident on these storms.

 

[Bill Doms]

I've been pretty lazy at getting any chase accounts posted. Full set of images and videos can be see HERE. Too bad the T/Td spread was so bad at the time of the tornado. From the time of the tornado until it lined out, the area of rotation was really broad and quite weak as Skip stated. Still looked pretty hairy though as the action area of the storm passed right over Sauk Rapids / St. Cloud.

After the initial little tornado, lots of dirt moving around under the meso but all was outflow driven. Still looked cool though.


Watch video >