4/20/04: REPORTS

Well better late than never... a week after the event I made it through the registration process and now I can post :)

Ben Cotton and I chased in central Indiana on the 20th, thinking we would see nothing more than marginally interesting scud. I won't go in to a lot of detail though 'cause Ben already did that in a previous post. We left West Lafayette around 3:30 and headed south. We briefly intercepted the cell that would go on to produce a tornado in Kokomo, observing a nice updraft base and the "interesting" scud that we were out to see. Rather than stay with that cell, we decided to head south to meet up with a newly formed cell WSW of Indianapolis.

When we arrived the cell had almost textbook structure, including a gorgeous, rapidly-rotating and backlit wall cloud. You just don't get that in Indiana often. We continued to watch and within 5 minutes, at 5:38 PM, Ben and I saw the first tornado of our chasing careers! The tornado briefly touched down in Jamestown and caused F1 damage. We followed the tornado/ funnel cloud for 20-30 minutes until it dissipated (fortunately) before moving directly over Lebanon, IN.

I posted many of the stills I took at the following URL:

http://kruze.dyndns.org/pics/thumbnails.php?album=86

What a day!
 
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