5/2/08 REPORTS: WI/MI/1A/IL/IN/AR/KY/TN/TX/MO

[Sheila_Ward]

5/2/08 REPORTS: AR/TN/MS

I was not prepared for things to start cranking as early as they did in AR, but a phone call alerted me that it was hitting the fan early and I was able to catch this wedge just south of Pettus. Unfortunately I got blocked in by the debris path and could never get back on this storm once it moved north of me. Tons of destruction and unfortunately lives lost in Arkansas today.

(video capture)

 

[John Farley]

Hope I got all the relevant states in the thread title!

Ah, timing is everything, and we did not have it today in Illinois. I was out twice, once to intercept the squall line that produced the tornadoes and hurricane force wind in the Kansas City area 7 hours earlier, and again to intercept the beginnings of the storms now ongoing in Michigan 5 hours after ending my chase! To my surprise, the cell I was watching in the squall line pulsed up severe and produced a swath of wind damage beginning about 9 miles north of where I intercepted it, but on the whole the line was dying out. In the afternoon I hoped cells trying to get going around and north of St. Louis might get going enough to do something in the very strong dynamics, but the shear was too much and they just kept getting torn apart until they got far north of where I could continue following them.

A not-too-interesting report and a few pictures here:

http://www.johnefarley.com/chase50208.htm

Hope someone caught something more interesting in Arkansas today or maybe before dawn in Kansas City or tonight in Michigan.

EDIT: Mods, can you combine this with the thread Sheila started at the same time? Thanx!

 

[Jeremy Ludin]

Chased with Joel Wright today in NC IL only to bust. Early morning junkvection once again seemed to spoil the show. Clearing started around noon which allowed temps to reach into the 70's, but dews would mix out not too long after. Leaving Erie in a rather pessimistic mood, we decided to head north toward Sterling, IL where moisture was a little better. We docked on a back road and waited for something to transpire, but winds started veering and the very few high based towers started turning to mush. Another non-event for the good ol' QC and surrounding areas. Instead of sitting bored out of our minds, I thought I'd put my HV20 to use and experimented with a little time lapse.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ssZVuBJuTvE

Nice grab Sheila!!

 

[tom hanlon]

Woke up in Springfield MO after chasing KS the night before. Before breakfast and shower we saw the tornado warnings under way already in the MI valley, Little Rock. We were 4 hours away but we headed in that general direction to chase the chaseable stretch from paducah to south of memphis.

We rolled in under the line and foolishly tried to catch a fast moving cell in far North East AR. When we gave up on that we headed south from Paragould to Jonesboro. Took 63 South of Jonesboro to Marked Tree and chased a tor warned cell, rain delayed us and we missed the tor. New and better cells warned to our south but unfortunately the tornado damage blocked our way and delayed us.

The delay was probably enough that when we went to intercept the tornado that started in earl we failed to get clear of it. we came in from the north and as I heard the warning on the radio and looked at the map.. I realized that to punch south would be disaster, to punch east might also be disaster so by the time we bailed west to safety, the storm had moved over 55 and was heading north, we never caught it again. The river and the need for gas complicated things.

Missed two tornadoes by minutes. So it goes, that is part of the chase i guess. This happened so early it was a struggle to get into position. And when you got there you had 6 tornado warned cells and some manuevering to do.

congrats to all who caught, and condolences to any who suffered from this round of storms.

--
Tom Hanlon

 

[Skip Talbot]

Saw my best base of the year!

So you can tell its been a slow start to the season. This sub severe cell did take on a horseshoe base momentarily before going to crap like most of the stuff in IL today. There were some scenic photos to be had around sunset, though, including pink anvils, rainbows, and nicely colored cu fields.

 

[Donald Giuliano]

Spent most of the day trying to play catch-up along I-40 while on the way to a friend's wedding in Nashville. Finally succeeded just southwest of Earle, AR, where one of the biggest wall clouds I've ever seen touched down with a nice rope that morphed into a monster wedge. Got good video, though not great due to the very rapid storm motion and a deteriorating road network as the storm approached the Mississippi River. Here are a few video captures, Reed will upload the video to YouTube soon.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Started the morning off at 5am. Headed south from Lansing, MI towards Indianapolis. Wasn't sure what to make of it, and almost called off the chase. Ended up going south on I-55 to I-57 towards the tornado warned cells in Arkansas. Thought I might be too late. After going after 2 of the cells and finding nothing but wall clouds, I headed south to Turrell, AR where I observed a very nice tornado.



Video is here

Edited the video while driving through Memphis and uploaded it, while heading east south east into Mississippi. Ended up intercepting a few more storms and saw another possible tornado or two (but it's hard to see in the night - will review video at a later date frame by frame and determine what exactly I might have seen)

It was nice to finally get my first daytime definite tornado.

Sitting here in Nashville after being up almost 22 hours and driving a heck of a lot of miles ready to go to bed!

 

[Danny Neal]

Had a backyard chase today....literally. Was on two hour sleep, my car was unavailable today, and I wasn't too excited about the MCS going downstate. I went to bed at 11 AM and woke up at 3 PM. I talked with Adam Lucio and Matt Fischer as they sat in Rochelle, IL, waiting for something...anything. The line of low topped "crapvection" was quickly marching east and it was only a matter of time before the threat was over. By luck, I glanced out my window at 6 PM to find solid convection going up all over suburban Chicago. So I grabbed my camera and fired off a few shots. Before long the storm to my south I had been taking structure shots of, went severe warned and was more or less making a bee-line for me. The storm produced pretty gusty winds, 40-50 mph gusts, torrential rain but minimal lightning/thunder. What made me happy was the beautiful rainbow appearing against the tornado warned cell in northwest Indiana.

Line of storms developing over the western suburbs.

Severe warned cell out ahead of line.

Rainbow against tornado-warned cell.

More Photos Here

 

[Stuart Robinson]

Captured Three Tornadoes over Arkensas yesterday. The first was a brief muti vortex near to Lepanto – the second was a much stronger cone tornado North of Lepanto, The third was a classic Elephant trunk Near to Turrell.

Later I crossed the Missouri river and tried to intercept storms around New Arkansas. I tried to punch the hook on one cell but turned around after I saw the amount of low level shear on GRL3.
Over all a good chase day, if a little tough due to road options, trees and fast moving storms.

 

[David Draun]

I took off at 4pm upon MCD issuance for NC IL. I was a bit pessimistic due to most of the CAPE and shear off to the NE in Wisconsin and near Chicago. The low-50's dewpoints were crap too. I went west on IL-38 to intercept the strengthening showers. The clouds had some nice convection to them but they were very low-topped. I allowed them to pass over me, before going after them moving east. They had some interesting base features too, but nothing that I would really call anything severe. The activity didn't even produce any lightning until it moved into the better moisture over the western suburbs. But it was a fun impromptu chase with lots of rainbows and some very heavy rain showers. Throw in a couple CGs toward the end, and it was sort of fun. The backlit (now warned supercells) behind me looked very impressive as I drove back west to Dekalb. The sheared cumulus towers along the cold front made for an interesting sunset view as I drove back west. I took a few pictures but nothing to write home about.

 

[Roger Hill]

Indeed, Stu Robinson and I, with the Silver Lining Tours armada, captured three tornadoes. I won't repost pics. First tornado occured as a supercell approached Marked Tree. Nice clear slot, backwards "C" shaped updraft and strong RFD. Weak multivortex tornado formed. A few minutes later a large cone tornado formed northeast of town and tracked just east of West Ridge. This tornado was fairly strong, great motion, morphed from a cone to multivortex to cone numerous times. Produced a damage path about 300 yards wide. Storm weakened so we dropped south to catch the storm coming from Little Rock. We intercepted it near Gilmore as a nice elephant trunk tornado formed to our west. CGs were extremely intense and very close. The tornado came over the trees into a field about 300-400 yards away and ripped them up, throwing them into the air. The tornado passed immediately to our north and crossed the MS river, killing our chance of continued intercept.

We dropped south to catch a cluster of supercells headed towards New Albany, MS. The first storm had EXTREME motion with a well formed hook. It had produced two tornadoes west of town. We got stuck on highway 78 as numerous cars stopped with the intense wind and golfball sized hail in the hook. Thus we missed the tornado. A second supercell came blasting towards us with the most spectacular structure I have ever witnessed in that part of the country. Numerous intense CGs, liberty bell, massive rotating wall cloud, and eventually a partially rain wrapped tornado. The RFD from this storm took down trees, power lines and took roofs of houses in town.

Great day!! More than I expected.

Roger Hill

 

[Kurt Hulst]

Northern Target IL/IN

Bob Hartig, Tom Osterban, and myself thought about sticking in MI for this event but we made a decision late in the day to try and head for Iowa or Northern IL. Well We made the northern IL target and watched as the cold front produced some low topped semi-supercell/linear string bean storms with very little lightning. We met up with Skip Tailbot and headed north on I-39. We broke off from heading north and headed east toward Plainfield to get ahead of the storms. Traffic was slow in spots. As we entered Joliet the storm we were in was warned for high wind. Then as we got through the Toll on I-80 we had really good contrast and color of the warned storm heading off to the north. As we entered Indiana the storm out of Kankakee, IL was tornado warned. People do not know how to drive in the rain which slowed us down from getting in position while it still had rotation associated with it. We intercepted it but it had weakened by then.

Any way We would of headed south had we been able to leave earlier. We just had a late start.


Heading North on I-39:

Storm further to the NW:

We let this one go and headed east:

Was able to capture this just west of Aroura and headed south to Plainfield.

Along I-80

Tornado Warned Storm:

You can see more pics on my blog.

 

[Laura Hedien]

We were also out on the Earle AR tor. It never really looked organized enough to do what it did.
Interesting to see an over night squall spawn somewhat discrete supercells. Always seems do be opposite.
We were 1.1 miles from the tornado as it went through Earle AR. We followed it almost 30 minutes and with it moving at about 50 kts it wasn't easy nor did we stop to get many pics.
The basket plant at 64 and 149 was hit and we were finding blue baskets over 28 miles away from the plant when we were out surveying damage the next day.
The damage to the houses (not mobile homes) on 9100 blk of 118 outside of Earle and in Heafer looked to be more than EF3 damage.
No fatalities as of today.
Laura

 

[Terry Tyler]

man, what a day...

i started off by getting ready to go to memphis, cause i was gonna be up there all weekend for memphis in may...i heard it was supposed to get pretty bad, so i took a look at what was going on with the weather and i seen that it looked pretty hairy...

well, after i got all my stuff ready i headed up there on 78 towards the holly springs area, and got on a pretty bad storm...i should have stayed out there, but you know how it was with the roads and all that...hell, i didnt even know if it had a warning, but it looked like it was fixing to get pretty bad...

i had a damn good spot to watch it from, and was pretty close...the storm had some great classic structure...ill need to get more pics later, but ive got a couple hundred from memphis in may and whatnot that i have to go through, so here are two of em...

the storm really was looking good, but i could see the RFD kept eroding the back side of the wall cloud and it got to looking pretty ragged...right when it started wrapping up i guess, you could see it pulling inflow hard from one side, and spinning slightly and just doing its thing...shortly after that you could see it was choking out the wall cloud and it got undercut...

you could almost immediatly start seeing the sky blacken to our east, and the storms wall cloud redeveloped...it moved soo fast, and looked so mean!

i tried to keep up, but in that town and with no map, i decided it was best to let it go about its way...

it had all kinds of neat things on the storm, there was alot of lightning, and there was a big rainfoot on the core and a clean cut updraft with all the good structure on it...

it was incredible to watch...i sat out there with it for a good 25-30 mins watching it do its thing, then finished it off with partying down in memphis watching disturbed and seether and project pat and all that...

just got home and i had a GREAT chase day, and a GREAT weekend!

 

[Ron_Jarrell]

Very good chase day for us with the exception of some streaming video problems. Vid cam problems also mostly due to excitement of camera operator.

Caught the Earle AR tornado in Earle, but couldnt get back to it without getting mixed up in debris path. Also caught the wall cloud before we repositioned and before it dropped the Earle tornado.

Caught a massive funnel in MS after sunset as well. Very good day.

Here's a terrible clip of the Earle tornado:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zflqvIqZ0mI