Chased today across mostly east-central North Dakota with a friend of mine and a co-worker. We generally targetted a corridor from Cooperstown, ND to Hillsboro, ND. Left town (Grand Forks) around 3:30pm and were southbound on I-29 when what became the Crookston, MN storm mushroomed. Literally exploded out of nothing in about 15 minutes and went tornadic shortly after 4:00pm. Was able to observe the tightening meso and the rope tornado southwest of Crookston. In the haste of flipping through the freq's and into the GFK Skywarn-net, wasn't able to get any photos unfortunately. I flip the HT over to the net, I look up, and the TOR had already dissipated. Didn't last but maybe 40 seconds, but it was a nice rope, to say the least.
Attempts at chasing later convection didn't pan out as we then migrated south and westward to slightly west of the tiny town of Galesburg, ND where we could find some slight elevation on the edge of the valley. Short-story: cap held strong until around 6:00, clouded over, towers started developing to our northwest, but didn't really organize until/towards sunset. The AccuWeather Premium "demo" on my Verizon package was actually quite helpful today, but very doubt I will pay the $3.99/mo subscription for any further service. It was showing organizing storms up in the Devils Lake Basin. We tried to drift northward as we started back... but couldn't really see much with the ungodly amount of low-level moisture and fog - especially as we traversed the warm front north of Hope, ND. We had visibilities down to 3/4 of a mile for a short-stretch along Highway 32. It was quite interesting...
Will likely have a log and photos of what I was able to shoot up on the blog, web-site, and gallery tomorrow.
Personally, not bad for a local chase to see my first TOR since April of 2004!
Attempts at chasing later convection didn't pan out as we then migrated south and westward to slightly west of the tiny town of Galesburg, ND where we could find some slight elevation on the edge of the valley. Short-story: cap held strong until around 6:00, clouded over, towers started developing to our northwest, but didn't really organize until/towards sunset. The AccuWeather Premium "demo" on my Verizon package was actually quite helpful today, but very doubt I will pay the $3.99/mo subscription for any further service. It was showing organizing storms up in the Devils Lake Basin. We tried to drift northward as we started back... but couldn't really see much with the ungodly amount of low-level moisture and fog - especially as we traversed the warm front north of Hope, ND. We had visibilities down to 3/4 of a mile for a short-stretch along Highway 32. It was quite interesting...
Will likely have a log and photos of what I was able to shoot up on the blog, web-site, and gallery tomorrow.
Personally, not bad for a local chase to see my first TOR since April of 2004!
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