2012-05-24: REPORTS: WI

[stephanieschweitzer]

Targeted my home area yesterday. In anticipation of events going severe I drove the 5 miles to the highest point with a great westerly view in my county, Waupaca, (as I could also check in with out local ARES/RACES skywarn net) and set up about an hour in advance. At about 7:30 PM GRB NWS asked for the county to open their skywarn net as a cell was passing through NW portion of our county. After checking in I watched the advance of a strong thunderstorm producing a lot of CTG lightning and precipitation in the background. SI got a call from our net liaison that GRB NWS wanted me to pay special attention to the area 3 miles to my west, I did see a lowering but I could not verify if it was rotating. About 2 minutes later I was hit with the gust front where the three aprox. 60 ft. tall maples in front of me bent to the ground. The gust front lasted for about 3 minutes and precipitation was light there after. There were about half a dozen or so live tree limbs down ranging from 6-8" inches in diameter.
I was told after the fact by our liaison that GRB had seen some light rotation on radar. I can not either verify or deny because of the lighting and speed at which these storms were flying (60 miles per hour to the north and 30 mph to the east).
Attached are a few photos from yesterdays chase.

 

[BHastings]

I also rolled the dice yesterday on a semi-local chase with a friend. We arrived in the Eau Claire, WI area around 2:30pm and waited for some cells off to the SW, which we hoped would become more organized with time. After killing a bit of time there, we dropped south and observed a cell passing by to our west just as we were coming up on Eleva. Instead of trying to follow it back up north into Eau Claire (it didn't look that promising), we headed east for better road options and placed ourselves in the prime position to observe (i.e. get run over by) a cell heading into Osseo. Found a parking lot overlooking the interstate with a prime view to our west, and we hunkered down there and got blasted by high winds, heavy rain and some pea-sized hail that lasted for a couple of minutes. After the rain died down a bit, we headed south on the interstate toward Black River Falls, where we watched a third cell pass overhead. It displayed some impressive rising motion and even what looked like horizontal rotation, but we didn't see any hints of vertical rotation in any of the cells we encountered. Not the most exciting chase, but still better than a blue-sky bust -- especially for a Wisconsin based chaser who missed out on the early stuff this year in the Plains.