Darren Lo
EF0
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2012
- Messages
- 39
I was in Roger Hill's group chasing in Saskatchewan that day. Craig Hilts, who lives in the area, served as our navigator. Here's a brief report. We started out the day in Swift Current, and stepped out of the hotel at 11 AM to see this elevated sculpted supercell handed to us on a platter -- no chasing required! Looking west as it headed toward us:
Note the hailicious greenish tinge. As the inflow winds at our vantage point changed to outflow winds, it was time to scramble to avoid getting nailed by the RFD. As the supercell headed roughly NE, we followed it east along Highway 1, eventually stopping at Chaplin and dropping southward to stay out of the outflow. Some instability was advecting northeast from Montana into the area, so we ducked into a restaurant in Gravelbourg for a quick bite to eat. Sure enough, when we stepped back out, a towering cumulus had erupted immediately west of us. We followed the developing supercell until it settled down on the outflow boundary or slightly north of it, spinning more or less in place. Soon a wall cloud had developed, with an additional suspicious lowering on the northern side:
The storm began moving NE more or less parallel to the boundary, but remained in the cold sector so it never managed to tap into the really good air. The meso occluded without dropping a tornado. Soon a second meso had spun up, acquiring a rather fuzzy mothership shape and dropping dime to quarter size hail. Looking roughly southeast:
That meso also occluded without dropping a tornado. One or two cycles later, we were looking at yet another occluding meso with wrapping rain curtains:
Roger started insulting the storm and it promptly responded by producing this suspicious bowl-shaped lowering:
The ugly duckling soon became a beautiful elephant trunk tornado! This was about 7 miles due west of our position, which was on a gravel grid road PR-626, due SE of Caron, SK.
The tornado was on the ground for but a minute or two. The only east options to stay with the storm involved traveling well south or north of our position. We decided to go north, but the precip core had passed over the gravel road and we sat in place for a few minutes, weighing the options. Meanwhile the meso, which was sitting right in front of us, decided to drop a nice cone tornado right next to a farmhouse. From reviewing video and pictures it appears that the tornado touched down, lifted, and touched down again. These images are after the first touchdown and lifting. The tornado was probably less than a mile distant, and its swishing waterfall sound was quite pronounced.
The farmhouse survived, but a quonset building was destroyed and a gas tank was flung far away. In addition, telephone or power poles north/northeast of the farmhouse were snapped and some trees were damaged. With power lines possibly down on the road, we couldn't go east, but had to drop back west to get onto Highway 1. By then there was no catching back up to the storm, but it doesn't appear to have produced any more tornadoes even though it kept on cycling until death. While traveling east on Highway 1, we observed what appeared to be the ropeout stage of the second tornado, away to our southeast. I don't have pictures of this.
While all this was going on, a huge squall line was coming up from the southwest out of Montana, probably moving at about 60 mph and closing in fast on our position and on our supercell. These shots of the shelf cloud from within the van can't do it justice:
The anvil area of the squall line also had some decent mammatus:
It became a race against time to get into Regina for the night before the squall line hit. Speeding southeast along Highway 11, we saw many chasers or local observers focusing intently on the soon-to-be-engulfed supercell, not even cognizant of the danger barreling down on them from the west. Hopefully they came out OK. We beat the squall line to our hotel by about 5 minutes. After the storms had passed, there was an incredible display of mammatus, which unfortunately I don't have any shots of, but you can see someone's YouTube video here.
A pretty amazing chase day, and very instructive because we got to watch a classic supercell cycle so many times and from such close vantage points. If only the storm had been on the boundary instead of behind it!
And here are my low-quality videos of the two tornadoes:
Tornado 1
Tornado 2
Note the hailicious greenish tinge. As the inflow winds at our vantage point changed to outflow winds, it was time to scramble to avoid getting nailed by the RFD. As the supercell headed roughly NE, we followed it east along Highway 1, eventually stopping at Chaplin and dropping southward to stay out of the outflow. Some instability was advecting northeast from Montana into the area, so we ducked into a restaurant in Gravelbourg for a quick bite to eat. Sure enough, when we stepped back out, a towering cumulus had erupted immediately west of us. We followed the developing supercell until it settled down on the outflow boundary or slightly north of it, spinning more or less in place. Soon a wall cloud had developed, with an additional suspicious lowering on the northern side:
The storm began moving NE more or less parallel to the boundary, but remained in the cold sector so it never managed to tap into the really good air. The meso occluded without dropping a tornado. Soon a second meso had spun up, acquiring a rather fuzzy mothership shape and dropping dime to quarter size hail. Looking roughly southeast:
That meso also occluded without dropping a tornado. One or two cycles later, we were looking at yet another occluding meso with wrapping rain curtains:
Roger started insulting the storm and it promptly responded by producing this suspicious bowl-shaped lowering:
The ugly duckling soon became a beautiful elephant trunk tornado! This was about 7 miles due west of our position, which was on a gravel grid road PR-626, due SE of Caron, SK.
The tornado was on the ground for but a minute or two. The only east options to stay with the storm involved traveling well south or north of our position. We decided to go north, but the precip core had passed over the gravel road and we sat in place for a few minutes, weighing the options. Meanwhile the meso, which was sitting right in front of us, decided to drop a nice cone tornado right next to a farmhouse. From reviewing video and pictures it appears that the tornado touched down, lifted, and touched down again. These images are after the first touchdown and lifting. The tornado was probably less than a mile distant, and its swishing waterfall sound was quite pronounced.
The farmhouse survived, but a quonset building was destroyed and a gas tank was flung far away. In addition, telephone or power poles north/northeast of the farmhouse were snapped and some trees were damaged. With power lines possibly down on the road, we couldn't go east, but had to drop back west to get onto Highway 1. By then there was no catching back up to the storm, but it doesn't appear to have produced any more tornadoes even though it kept on cycling until death. While traveling east on Highway 1, we observed what appeared to be the ropeout stage of the second tornado, away to our southeast. I don't have pictures of this.
While all this was going on, a huge squall line was coming up from the southwest out of Montana, probably moving at about 60 mph and closing in fast on our position and on our supercell. These shots of the shelf cloud from within the van can't do it justice:
The anvil area of the squall line also had some decent mammatus:
It became a race against time to get into Regina for the night before the squall line hit. Speeding southeast along Highway 11, we saw many chasers or local observers focusing intently on the soon-to-be-engulfed supercell, not even cognizant of the danger barreling down on them from the west. Hopefully they came out OK. We beat the squall line to our hotel by about 5 minutes. After the storms had passed, there was an incredible display of mammatus, which unfortunately I don't have any shots of, but you can see someone's YouTube video here.
A pretty amazing chase day, and very instructive because we got to watch a classic supercell cycle so many times and from such close vantage points. If only the storm had been on the boundary instead of behind it!
And here are my low-quality videos of the two tornadoes:
Tornado 1
Tornado 2
Last edited by a moderator:
