5/7/10 REPORTS: IN/OH/MI

[Adam Lucio]

Targeted the I-69 corridor. Storms went up in area expected and slowly became severe as they raced east. Core punched intense storm near Holgate, OH with severe winds approaching or even exceeding 70mph along with wind driven hail mostly golfball size but wouldn't doubt bigger stones mixed in. Thankful I didn't lose any windows.

Noted some tree damage in town. Storm speeds ended the chase early today, our storm was tornado warned and the warning mentioned it was moving east at 75mph! IMPOSSIBLE to keep up with even on the excellent road network in NW Ohio.

Video Screen cap of trees getting shredded from the wind driven hail:

Full account will be posted in a day or so.

All in all a great and exciting chase, I got what I wanted. I never expected today to be a tornado day and I set out with the intention to get into some intense winds and hail. Chasing is much more enjoyable when you don't always set out expecting tornadoes.

 

[Danny Neal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT8zVdXOfeE - My video from today. Much the same as Adam's. Again full account and log will be up in the next day or two!

 

[Mike Kovalchick]

Chased the same tornado warned supercell that headed ENE out of Ft. Wayne. (Meet up first with Bob Hartig & Bill Oosterbaan near Ashley, Ohio North of Ft. Wayne..and later joined Ben Holcomb & his group I think near Bryan, Ohio.) There was no actual tornado reports with this storm. (It was likely elevated.)

Had immediate concerns about the setup as it was clear that the winds in the warm sector were veered, LFC levels on the SPC Mesoanalysis too high everywhere, and storms that crossed the warm front were going about 100 yards then crapping out! (The warm front was actually best described as stationary as the cold pool to the North in Michigan from all the convection there wasn't allowing any Northward motion. ) It took awhile but a linear line that formed initially in NW Indiana started to get discrete as time wore on. We targeted the storms on the South end of the line that were headed in the general direction of the warm front.

Fun chase despite the extreme storm motion. The highlight of the chase was an incredible hail core that can best be described as Niagra Falls pouring down on the other side of a large field from our group. We only had a few seconds to enjoy the spectacle before we had to flee in order to not get cored. (I suspected the core contained golf ball to tennis ball size hail.) A couple minutes after that, a nice burst of outflow/RFD like winds came through blowing a lot of dust.

Storm features were on the bland side but at one point there was a long, skinny bell shaped mesofeature that was quite interesting but which I didn't manage to get a photo. The chasing terrain in NW Ohio was surprisingly Kansas like and quite enjoyable.

Now..back to reality...3" of snow so far this morning in Northern Michigan!

 

[John Vandehei]

I can certainly testify to the speed of these storms. I wasn't really chasing, as I was returning home after visiting my terminally ill father in Milwaukee. The storms quickly developed when I was in the vicinity of Gary, IN. One cell formed right on top of me. Despite me heading eastbound on I-94 between 70-80 mph, the storm still pulled ahead of me by the time I crossed into Michigan. Nothing severe where I was, just some torrential rain. Looking at RadarScope on my iPhone, might have been some hail nearby. Since I was driving my wife's car, I did my best to stay away from that.

 

[Bob Hartig]

Like that photo of the RFD scooting across the road, Mike! I'm attaching another shot from a closer vantage point. More images and a full writeup can be found here. But in short, I'll affirm what others have said about yesterday's storms being real space shuttles. Ohio has great road grids, but even with those, there was no point even trying to keep pace with storms moving as fast as these were (though we sure gave it our best shot).

If the winds had at least been southerly instead of veering pretty abruptly on the south side of the warm/stationary front, I think we'd have gotten a few tornadoes out of this system. Not much in the way of structure, but the two storms we targeted did have their moments, especially the second storm. The visually stunning hail core that Mike has mentioned sweeping toward us across the landscape south of Paulding was worth the trip in itself, at least from this Great Lakes chaser's point of view.

 

[Adam Lucio]

Full account is now online at http://www.aerostorms.com/050710-holgate-ohio-strong-wind-and-large-hail.php

 

[Ben Holcomb]

I finally got around to posting my chase account from this day, albeit almost a month late

Better late then never, right?

http://www.benholcomb.com/Chase-Accounts/20100507