I woke up at 5 am this morning expecting a tornado or two, maybe briefly touching down and stirring some things up in front of me. I figured I could get close enough to get it on video, bail east, and use the miracle that is Illinois' road network to stay with storms moving NNE at 45 knots. I turned out to be completely wrong, but it worked out in the end, so all is good.
Before I say anything, I think it is only fair to point out that Devin's insistence a week ago in the ST Discord that this was a legitimate cold core or even low topped setup is nothing short of prescient. He was on the money all week long, and having never really been introduced to the concept of a cold core low and low topped supercells that come from these sort of setups, he basically had me convinced six days ahead of time that this was the event that Illinois chasers have been begging for all year, so convinced that I proudly told my own mom that there will be tornadoes on Saturday and to keep a look out for something crazy to happen.
I picked up Chris Bray at his home and met my regular partner Nick Krietz on the way down and we piled into my SUV. We started off in Jacksonville, pilfering the McDonald's for wifi because we're all Verizon users and I-72 hates Verizon. We knew things would probably be fine when the sun came out by 9:30 am and we watched as initiation occurred just northwest of St. Louis. We bided our time going after those first storms even when we recognized that one was quickly becoming dominant among the cluster in hopes that we wouldn't have to play with any rivers, but on December 1, you take what you can get, so eventually we meandered west down the interstate leaving reception and the comforts of a connected society behind. We chased the first three hours of this day without a single radar update and GPS on my offline map files that I downloaded in 2016. It was an adventure.
We sat at an interchange off I-72 and highway 100 for nearly an hour as this dominant storm slowly progressed our direction, its speed far slower than we had anticipated. We probably saw three or four brief, insignificant tornadoes as it came our way, or at least funnels. It was basically in a constant state of flux between an uncondensed tornado and a cycling funnel cloud. I will call this my first tornado of the day to be conservative, but in reality it was probably my third or fourth individual tornado to this point. It came close enough to where the ground swirls were on the near side of the hill, not far from where I had us positioned an hour prior.
Nick and I traveled to Alabama together on March 19. We can technically claim that we saw two tornadoes that day, but in reality the Belmont EF-0 we saw was nothing more than an invisible swirl out of a wall cloud and the Russellville EF-2 was only visible for a brief few seconds with basically no contrast through the rain. We decided that this one was more worthy of being called his first tornado. As of this evening, he has seen more tornadoes in December than I have in April.
We followed this tornado to the north as it danced harmlessly in the woods and in some fields. The storm cycled again. It produced multiple funnel clouds, one of which briefly touched down in front of us - our second tornado of the day. I didn't get a shot of the ground swirl, but this stout funnel put on quite a show for us before this storm became a little bit more of the HP variety.
Only for a short while, though. We made our way up the east end of the river, along with a conga line of no more than a dozen chasers that managed to take this storm on, toward Beardstown. On the way, we observed numerous funnels, most of them of the whitish, front-lit variety. Some chasers obsess over the dark cone against a bright sky. I obsess over the exact opposite. After too many funnels to count, one of them finally gave us something to really get excited about.
Link to the video of this tornado:
At this point, I'm happy. Nick has his first photogenic, close range tornadoes. Chris is in the back seat excited about his first chase since the spring being such a successful one. My DSLR is getting more work than it has on every other chase I've taken it on since I bought it combined. It's just a good day. Our expectations are shattered. We're having fun and loving life. As we're doing so, the storm motion picks up to just about what we thought it would be basically out of nowhere and we find ourselves 10 miles behind this storm without radar, without accurate GPS, and with the next supercell's anvil raining down on us. We decide to catch up to the first storm instead of dropping down to the second, which looked more HP and had less going on in general. When we did, we saw this.
Seriously?
You all know by now that this turned into a multivortex wedge. Unfortunately, our path across the river, which would have given us the shot of a lifetime as this tornado navigated just west of Havana, IL, was blocked by the local police department. It's hard to blame them for doing so, but despite everything today it feels like a missed opportunity. Even so, we got bonus points for seeing a fat stovepipe with a satellite
while there was snow on the ground. Crazy stuff.
Our view of this tornado vanished as it wrapped itself in rain, so we went east, just about ready to go find a spot for dinner when a thought occurred to me. That southern storm we had previously neglected was still right on our tail, and in an environment that just spawned a likely violent tornado, why not give it a shot? The sun was about to set, but we ducked south. We pulled up about 15 miles away from its base. Despite how far we were from it, I told Nick and Chris that if this storm decided to put down a tornado, it was going to be in the field next to us. We stopped directly in its path and that was the best decision we made all day.
This sunset mothership put on a show, but as it got closer, it began drawing in inflow. Shortly thereafter, it had two funnels simultaneously, one stemming from the wall cloud and the other directly from the base. The funnel coming from the base won the battle, and shortly thereafter we had a close range, high contrast tornado on the ground as the sun began to set. It was a hell of a grand finale. Follow this link and you'll be able to see it.
https://www.facebook.com/spencer.dant.9/posts/2125211150874961
If you prefer, you can also watch on Youtube, or watch the embedded video.
We weaved our way back and forth through nocturnal tornado warnings back home and we all made it back safely. The lightning was so, so much more intense than we had expected all the way back in every storm, big or small. We were all a little bit astounded, surprised, and ultimately thrilled. I have no idea how many tornadoes we saw. Maybe 5. Maybe 10. I'll figure that out another day. For now, I'm going to sleep, and wish all of you a good night.
. I watched as the jumbled mess in front of me pushed east, lit beautifully by the setting sun. Some of the storms briefly became supercells, but nothing in this cluster looked promising, so I gave up and went home. More photos and detailed log here: 
