6/14/08 REPORTS: TX/IA

[Jason Boggs]

Started off the day west of Amarillo and fiddled with a storm near Wildorado. After looking on radar and seeing the storms strengthen as they moved east, I began going east for the intercept. Really not much to speak of besides rain, a little hail, and some nice mammatus photos south of Silverton. I really don't care that the chase wasn't that interesting because we needed th rain extremely bad.

As I made my way south of Silverton, I saw David Drummond on spotternetwork, so I stopped to say hi. I met 2 other chasers (sorry, I forgot their names) and we talked for a while. After a while we parted ways and went home. It's always good to end a chase meeting new people and talking with good friends...that's the way I like it. Here are the photos:

 

[Mike Umscheid]

Well, by dumb luck, I had a "left-mover on steroids" move basically right toward the southern edge of my target, after basically giving up on possible storms developing across Beaver County, OK southeast of LBL (which was what I was originally hoping for and the reason I left Dodge for this evening out-and-back). Looking back at AMA radar data, it looks like this storm actually initiated immediately northeast of the first storm that developed ~ 25 N AMA between 2130 and 2145 UTC. It looks like it decided to become a left-mover all on its own as it started developing nicely just southeast of Borger after 2145 UTC. Up through 0000 UTC it looks like it even shed a couple right-members that went off and died! Fascinating. I wasn't interrogating 88D data all that closely in-situ -- all I knew was that there was a storm moving northeast, instead of southeast, and I had just assumed that it was a left-moving storm right away, because I knew this was a "northwest flow" environment. Since my Beaver Co. towers died, I just decided "what the hell" and planned an intercept, under the assumption it would continue to be a dominant left-mover and continue moving northeast. This worked out great. I drove to Follett, then east toward Hwy 283 north of Shattuck where I continued east, north of Gage, eventually ending at Woodward at around 0145 UTC. This storm was very photogenic with blue sky all around the convection. I even had a small wall cloud at times with this thing, which did rotate a bit. The contrast and color as the sun got low was superb. Exactly what I was hoping for...but not out of a left-mover! What a fun and interesting short chase.

I uploaded 8 images from this chase, see this blog post!

 

[Steve Miller TX]

A few pics from my chase report. I don't know how I didn't pass you Jason. lol

Weak landspout north of Claude....not a gustnado. It actually moved north back into the storm and looked better at one point than this picture. Jay McCoy was with me and confirms it.

Looking east from FM207 on the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.

A nice "bownado".

 

[Dan Melby]

Had a good chase in central Iowa. Knowing there was a moderate threat for hail a I just monitored things from my house in Ames until I witnessed a cell fire just to the north, then I was out the door.
I intercepted te cell 7 miles west of Marshalltown, right then the cell split and was tornado warned. The cell had rotation and spun up brief funnels over marshalltown. I was on the cell to SE of Toledo when I ran out of dry road options... I finally got to chase a decent cell with some structure in Iowa, which has been hard to come by for me this year.

 

[Bill Doms]

MN bow echo and trailing sup

Had another bow echo move through central MN with some modest winds of 50-65 mph. Not a real big deal other than several communities were holding summer festivals and outdoor music festivals. The south end of the bow did produce a few nice gustnadoes. After flaking one for several miles we allowed it to cross over us with winds up to 52 mph. Once that raced off to the southeast. A rather high based supercell formed on the edge of the outflow. It was severe warned but the best part of the show was this precip shaft which was caught in some type of dry downdraft which formed a pretty nice tornado look alike. It was enough to fool a local farmer who was concerned for our safety and came out to offer us refuge at his place if needed...lol.

More pics and some video clips HERE

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

I can confirm that landspout that Steve and Jay saw near Claude as well. I saw it as I was sitting just off I-40 near Conway looking to my south. I didnt realize how high up the dirt was being pulled into the air till after I took a couple photos. It looked connected to the cloud on the preview screen on my camera, but I havent looked at them on the computer yet. There was some interesting motion in the cloud above the landspout, but it definitely was not anything organized. It was not too bad of a chase considering I went out with a dead camcorder (DSLR was still fully charged luckily), no power inverter, and I was not in my regular chase vehicle. I saw what looked like a downburst right over Panhandle. It didnt look very strong but spun up at least a dozen gustnadoes as it spread out north of town. After that "downburst", it screwed up the flow into the storm I was watching so I moved south to I-40 and stayed there till my computer's battery died and the storms near me seemed to weaken. I did see decent rotation a couple different times near the interstate as well as that landspout, but the highlight was watching one of those big, orange construction barrels bounce across the highway in front of a semi on I-40 (hopefully the pictures turned out well). Will try to post some pics in the morning.