2017-06-13 REPORTS: MN/SD/NE/IA

[Dean Baron]

Just going to do a quick summary since I don't have video or pictures off of my actual cameras yet.

Left work at 3:00 from Minneapolis and headed west. Knew I wouldn't make the triple point in SD but figured the warm front might have a chance to do something. A couple showers must've been riding the warm front as it moved north and one of them finally found a hole in the cap around Montevideo, MN. Got on it before it went tornado warned. Followed it for 2-3 hours up to near Alexandria, MN. The storm had great structure with a big rotating wall cloud but took a long time to finally put down tornadoes. Near Hancock, MN it finally put a few down. I saw 2 myself, the first being a small/brief tornado in a field. Shortly after that, it put down a much bigger/stronger tornado north of Hancock. I've attached a cell phone pic of the tornado. I have HD video as well as multiple pics from the DSLR of it, but I won't have a chance to upload those for a couple days.

 

[Tim Nendick]

Spending time in MN for other reasons. I was aware of the high EHI values south of the warm front but I was pretty skeptical that storms would fire on that front, to be honest. I was under the front for most of the day and there was a persistent cloud deck left over from morning convection that was struggling to burn off. Instability - even though it was very high to the south - didn't feel like it'd reach the front in time and instead the event would be (eventual) MCS moving in from SD. The HRRR and NAM increasingly supported this and I chose to not spend time getting west where the potential felt best.

As the cloud deck started to burn off around 3PM, small cumulus started forming above the inversion. Noticed they were trying to get surface energy with little bases clearly lower than the inversion - even though they weren't near actually breaking through the cap, it was clear it would somewhere and that when they did, they'd be nicely surface based. Grabbed satellite data and saw the same cell near Montevideo getting going and thought it looked like the only area that had deeper convection and thought it would likely remain discrete. It matched my earlier forecast of position, so I jumped in the car and headed that way and watched it really take on nice shape on radar on the hour and a half drive towards it. Was afraid my indecision was going to cost the chase, especially when it picked up a tornado warning and I was still out half an hour.

Ultimately, got on that cell in time to see both tornadoes it produced - played them pretty conservatively so I could remain on new cells that formed south and it looked pretty clear that the tornado producing cell would get cut off quickly. The new cells went through several wall clouds, sometimes with good RFD, but ultimately they didn't produce. While I didn't have the most photogenic view of the tornado, I did see the whole lifecycle and was able to stay in good position throughout the event.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Marginal day in central Nebraska, basically an on-the-way-home chase, since the best target was out of reach starting from Sidney. This was the best I saw near Brewster:



More images and dashcam timelapse here:
http://stormhighway.com/june132017.php