6/21/09 REPORTS: IA/MN

[cstrunk]

Chased the Fort Dodge-Waterloo, IA supercell. I was heading back to Ames from home, and in Des Moines I heard about the tornado warnings with the storm near Iowa Falls. Intercepted the storm west of Grundy Center. Beautiful storm, producing many long lived wall clouds and several nice funnels, but I did not see any tornadoes. HP mess.

Many spotters and chasers on this storm from what I saw, should be interesting to see pictures of any of the reported tornadoes.

I'll post a full report with pictures tomorrow.

 

[Jeff Duda]

This was a very frustrating chase for me. I was on the cells that were apparently dropping tornadoes left and right. I could see into the areas where rotation was supposed to be, but I saw nothing...nothing more than the occasional lowering and marginal rotating wall cloud. I did witness a good solid RFD cut with a wall cloud just west of Holland, but the lowering behind the rain never appeared to drop anything, and then it all became rain wrapped. I am very curious to see pictures/video of these tornadoes because I didn't see ANYTHING from where I was.

(Note: Post moved from NOW thread)

EDIT: Added pictures taken looking west from M Ave. just north of 210th St. just east of Holland. Apparently the tornado near there is in these pictures. Can anyone who was around there or who has similar pictures corroborate this?

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2538.jpg

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2539.jpg

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2540.jpg

 

[Bill Schintler]

Eastern IA chase

Had a nice chase in the back yard. Today was a bit of a sleeper - looking at data last night I was not expecting much - not even enough to post a forecast. This morning, an area of rain affected eastern IA through noon. I wasn't paying any attention to data until 4 PM - then I realized it was chase time. Amazing instability developed over the period of a few hours, despite poor lapse rates. Impressive directional shear existed N and E of a boundary from the morning convection. The pre-storm sky had "that look" - lots of SC indicating moisture and low cloud base heights.

I intercepted the cell near Marengo, IA (50 miles east of Des Moines). It produced a rotating wall cloud that persisted for a half hour or more, but it just couldn't get the job done other then a few brief funnels. It looks like overly excessive convection diminished tornado potental today. When my wall clould was trying to do its thing, storms and rain firing to the east fed rain-cooled air into my storm...

- bill

 

[Kevin Walters]

I observed a brief tornado East of Williams in Hamilton county at 5:55PM. I observed a second brief/weak tornado SE of Iowa Falls at 6:53PM. Observed a stovepipe tornado with debris cloud North of Steamboat Rock just across highway 20 at 7:01PM. This tornado was visible for about one minute before becoming wrapped in rain. The storm moved East and continued to exhibit strong rotation. South of Wellsburg strong RFD winds caught up to us and swirling rain curtains obscured any possible tornado. As the storm moved East toward Dike heavy rain again blocked our view of the tornado that occurred West of Dike. Saw quite a few chasers out there today including a guy that stopped in the middle of a highway on an overpass. He got out to shoot video, left his car door wide open and stood in the traveled portion of the road. Not good.

 

[Nathan Schnur]

North Central IA Chase

Newbie here to the board. Frequent visitor but never posted. Chase started in the Ames area and I ended up on the storms just south of Webster City as they were finally starting to get their act together. I ended up staying on the southern most storm the whole chase because I didn't want to leave it for the northern warned cell in fear I would miss something. The southern most cell was pretty prolific at spitting out short lived wall clouds for an hour or so but it eventually paid off south of Kamrar where it dropped a very short lived funnel.

From there I chased east for awhile before needing to head home for other activities. This happened to be about the time tornadoes started being spotted. It was an interesting day nonetheless, much better then cap bust Thursday. Pics below.

http://www.chaseiowa.com/Photos/Storm%20Chasing/wall-cloud2.jpg

http://www.chaseiowa.com/Photos/Storm%20Chasing/wall-cloud.jpg

http://www.chaseiowa.com/Photos/Storm%20Chasing/kamrar-funnel.jpg

http://www.chaseiowa.com/Photos/Storm%20Chasing/supercell.jpg


Nathan

 

[Colin Davis]

EDIT: Added pictures taken looking west from M Ave. just north of 210th St. just east of Holland. Apparently the tornado near there is in these pictures. Can anyone who was around there or who has similar pictures corroborate this?

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2538.jpg

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2539.jpg

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2540.jpg

Jeff,

I was on the north side of Holland from about 7:25 until 7:33. I can verify that there was indeed a tornado at approximately 7:31pm, although I saw nothing like that Dike picture...damn. The photos you shared are of the rotating wall cloud that produced it. We sat JUST north of Holland until the meso began to become wrapped in precip from the south, at which point we moved north about a mile in order to stare down the notch (this is when the couplet was strongest...at approximately 7:30pm). We figured this was the only way to see anything that could be in there. I was able to observe a large needle funnel (oxymoron, I know, but I hestitate to call it anything other than a needle) that eventually extended to about 3/4 of the way down. Even though I thought it was likely that there was a ground circulation, I refused to call it a tornado (although I did report a funnel on SN) at the time, but the two LSRs from the Holland area (storm chaser reporting tor and damage in the rain curtains 3W Holland and spotter reporting trees uprooted 2W Holland, both at the same time as my funnel) pushed me over the edge.


Anyway, long story short, I was on the quasi-supercells from initiation southeast of Webster City until its final tornado warning near Waterloo. Saw many classic wall clouds and the tornado near Holland that FINALLY broke my Iowa curse. I still am not a fan of Iowa, though. What a mess those storms were. Will review photos asap; I know I did get a few of the tornado, though, so will try and get one up as soon as I can. For now, though, I'm headed to bed.

 

[Brian Stertz]

Back from a decent chase across Hamilton...Hardin...Grundy Counties IA. Observed several legit funnels and confirmed one definite tornado sw of the small town of Cleves in Hardin Co. Saw the TIV in my immediate vicinity at this time. This was a tightly wound meso for a while with sporadic mutliple vortices whipping about. It eventually consolidated into a truncated cone before heavy rain curtains absorbed the area of interest from my view. Then we moved over to the next strong meso which was a broad...and pretty outflow dominated circulation at Wellsburg. One lesser trained volunteer fire doofus had the road blocked forcing a log-jam just north of town. Meanwhile the doofus did not realize that the circulation was east of the road...and the town was about to get blasted by damaging outflow. I pretty much gave up the chase at Wellsburg (maybe a little prematurely) as the circulation cycled once ...maybe twice more in the Holland-Dike area further east in Grundy Co. It appeared to me that the rfd's and outflow overpowered the inflow today. The spin above was quite good but the circulations seemed to have some struggles with making it solidly on the ground...with additional troubles with hard wrapping rain curtains. One observation of note, I did not have one hailstone hit my car from the start of the chase sw of Blairsburg to the end of chase at Wellsburg.

 

[Darrin Rasberry]

Finally caught a very brief tornado on the I-20 corridor for the first time this year, somewhere northwest of Wellsburg (sp?) although I didn't see the one reported two miles south of there - and I was right there (practically under the rotation) the whole time. Chase partner Craig Maire, chasing with a different crew today, caught a cone tornado on tape near that area as well.

Unfortunately my camera was off and the tube we saw (my gf's first) was too short-lived for a camera dig-out and recording, but a catch is still a catch. Iowa ROCKS!!!

 

[Daniel Christianson]

As mentioned above by Kevin and others. I was on that storm, the first touchdown wasn't so definite as a funnel, you could see the rain and clouds wrapping and what looked like scud rapidly spun from the ground and up into the cloud, so i knew there was something in there. Continued follwing the storm east on a gravel road and finally i got my first tornado of the year, ok well with great visibility unlike my Oklahoma one. I have to say though this storm got some great structure to it for me personally anyways. Another problem though i may of had visibility on the tornado but it quickly wrapped in rain, as did all the other storms. You would finally get a great view of a wall cloud then it would wrap up in rain, 3 storms i was on did that to me! Will post pics here shortly.

( NOTE )Looking NE from Hwy 20/Side-Road. This tornado was visible for a minute or so, it then wrapped up in rain and im sure it still held together for another few minutes, fromm my vantage point looking at the rain it just looked like it was still wrapped up in there somewhere, also on video later on i got what might be another tornado, from what i can see is this ragged looking cloud really wrapping up and rotating with the rain curtains. Just wanted to add one more picture to show the beautiful storm, to the northwest was a very low to the ground rainbow as well.

 

[Joel Wright]

Fun chase Sunday out in Iowa. It's been a looong day so I'll make this brief.

Basically got on the storms early north of Ames and followed them eastward just south of route 20. Saw a nice wallcloud west of Buckeye. From my vantage point I saw a weak funnel, but no tornado. Didn't last long.

Followed a very nice wallcloud with rapid rotation east of Buckeye. It really started spinning after a very nice RFD notched in but all it did was make it spin faster. A little later I saw a brief tornado about 6 miles north of Eldora, south of Cleves. It appeared to be growing and of course then it decided to wrap itself in rain.

After that I hopped on route 20 and pushed eastward and got ahead of the storm. At that point a new storm had formed to the south and merged with it forming a very large supercell. Looked very nice west of Dike. Got some fantastic structure shots there looking west right on route 20. Saw a few nice lowerings that quickly wrapped in rain. Guess there was a tornado a bit later in Dike but I missed it.

I made a run at the tornado warned cells west of Iowa City but by the time I got there darkness was setting in, and storm competition was killing tornado prospects.

A few photos from Sunday. Note, the bottom picture is highly contrasted in an attempt to make the rain wrapped tornado a bit more visible.

 

[AndyGabrielson]

This was a very frustrating chase for me. I was on the cells that were apparently dropping tornadoes left and right. I could see into the areas where rotation was supposed to be, but I saw nothing...nothing more than the occasional lowering and marginal rotating wall cloud. I did witness a good solid RFD cut with a wall cloud just west of Holland, but the lowering behind the rain never appeared to drop anything, and then it all became rain wrapped. I am very curious to see pictures/video of these tornadoes because I didn't see ANYTHING from where I was.

(Note: Post moved from NOW thread)

EDIT: Added pictures taken looking west from M Ave. just north of 210th St. just east of Holland. Apparently the tornado near there is in these pictures. Can anyone who was around there or who has similar pictures corroborate this?

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2538.jpg

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2539.jpg

http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~jdduda/portfolio/100_2540.jpg

yes because about 7 mins before it got to holland i got hit by part of a shed roof

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiXpQ3DMSC0

first part is near steamboat rock/owasa then the second half is 5 or 6 mi. west of holland

 

[John Wetter]

Time for a couple quick pictures before bed...

First funnel cloud of the day 3 SSE Williams, IA:

This one went on to produce our first brief touchdown of the day 1N Berlin, IA:

Our second tornado was in a downpour and we only saw it because of our proximity and the leaves falling out of the sky from one direction. Maybe some video, but no stills as we were trying to keep ahead of it.

This last one is just before the Dike, IA tornado touched down. Just as it touched down we got blasted by a very wet RFD. I kept the video running but my camera got so much water on the lens I couldn't see it. I got video of the debris whirl under this, but it quickly got wrapped in rain.

Overall a rewarding but very challenging day. We were lucky to see several of the tornadoes from sitting right in the bears cage for most of the chase. I credit this to the slow speed of the storms and to my wife for some excellent navigating of a couple river valleys!

 

[afischer]

Finally broke the curse and saw tornadoes in Iowa (weird)... that is, after having actually had a day off in 2009 that coincided with decent tornado potential (even weirder!). Very hectic chase, partly due to way too many updrafts with way too much extreme rainfall, partly due to inexplicably having no DSM/DVN radar data on my wxorwx (yes, I still have no cell tether etc for GR on the road), and partly due to both my road atlas and 03 Streets & Trips having Highway 20 in the wrong place (it must have moved south?)! Got to Storm Lake by 12:30pm... checked data and repositioned to Fort Dodge. Got on the showery and primarily multicell convection southeast of there which struggled for the longest time, and had some decidedly odd cloudbase features/motions.

Seemed that two updrafts evolved and we ended up on the tail-end one... when the leading cell became tor-warned. By the time we intercepted the leading one northeast of Jewell IA, its updraft (and scuddy fingers) became rain-wrapped. As we ducked south to get back in front of the now tor-warned trailing cell (which still looked primarily linear)... suddenly a seemingly brand new updraft came out of the rain just to our north (likely between the two initial storms!) with a strong RFD occlusion. A frontlit rope funnel/possible tornado came out of this occluded meso and persisted about 30 seconds, then breaking in half and slowly dissolving (John Wetter has a nice shot of this). This was probably around 5 miles south of Williams, IA.

Not really sure what happened after that, but I think a dominant cell emerged ahead of the junkus that the 3 previous cells had become. This storm tracked along just north of what I now "understand" to be Highway 20, producing 2-3 tornadoes in Hardin/Grundy counties. The last of these I think was around 635PM, and surprisingly lasted a couple minutes before coming rain-wrapped. Around and prior to that time, the storm structure finally resembled something semi-normal... with a rounded base and a strong and pretty clear slot.

Continued east toward what appeared to be a new updraft evolving dowstream toward Waterloo, while keeping a wary eye on the increasingly outflow-dominant looking primary cell trailing west behind us. Generally I was quite confused as to what types of features I was seeing with both storms. My fairly inexperienced chase partner then pointed out some rotation to our south, which I immediately discounted as "nothing to get excited about." The persistent cloud base motions though caused me to take a closer look... and I then noticed the rock hard vertical tower above it. I'm almost confident this was a relatively young/new updraft... and this was what ultimately produced the dramatic tornado west of Dike, IA. A pronounced laminar funnel suddenly evolved... then dissipated... then cloud-base rotation ensued again. Another funnel formed from a completely circular and wildly spinning cloud-base appendage... the funnel bent toward us and developed a ground circulatoin as it moved northeast toward Highway 20. The circulation looked increasingly violent as it whizzed across the highway and began mowing down trees just to its north (interestingly, a man stood outside his car in the westbound lane, watching the tornado from a distance of between 0 and 10 meters). Then the tornado unfortunately struck some sort of farm buildings, which resulted in the stark brown & white column of debris at its base as in the posted photo in the DISC thread. The tornado became completely stationary at that point and remained a thick white rope from our vantage point as rain curtains (probably from upstream convection) wrapped around it. Had probably lasted 8-9 minutes before we completely lost it in the rain.

Will post a more detailed account later with specific times and locations, and hopefully with video captures if I can figure out how to make them.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Saw that first slanted long white funnel near Williams. It was pretty damn cool and may have had helical vorticies off of it, thought I saw them as I then moved my head into the car to get the still cam.

I then drove north and then east forever thinking I'd want to intercept that lead thing going ne ahead of the two storms(since both the other two weren't doing terribly well now), but it more or less merged into a mess. The drive east was uber wet/hard to see to drive in. This was on some country road north of Iowa Falls. I drop south, east of there, and watch the Cleves tornado/thingy do its thing to my wnw. It was buried in a mess but looked a lot like a very occluded area forming a tornado. Problem was it appeared to rotate so slowly. I guess it was a tornado.

The more fun part of the day was west of Holland. I could see a nice rfd cut and rotation kicking in, so I went west for a closer inspection. I thought it was forming just north of that highway, but soon could tell it was going to carve it out almost on the highway. I'm guessing Andy's part on video may have been happening as I drove east one of the times early. The slow moving wispy funnel stuff, not the debris part. I stop again still west of Holland a few miles and shoot video of really fast northbound rain curtains moving down the highway. As soon as they'd hit me I'd drive another mile east or so and film them again. I could never seen any condensation under that in the rain, but it seemed fairly obvious one wouldn't want to drive west into those rain bands and see if they could find clouds in there. It really gave the impression there were tornadic winds in there. I didn't pay huge attention, but seems that must have been 5 miles or so west of town.

I soon grew tired of rain and more-so extreme sticky humidity. Really can't run the air if you have any plans on shooting video or stills later with the window open. So I started the drive home around 8:30 or so. I then wind up messing around in those wind mill farms near Walnut IA until 2:30 a.m. I've never grown so sick of gravel roads and trying to find a good angle! Lord. I had to do at least 50 miles(literally) of driving in squares. It just looked rather amazing, especially on high ISO (1600) longer exposures. You had all these blades lighting up red in unison. It's kind of neat there at night if you haven't seen it. Then amazingly enough in the thick humidity, the Milkyway was shining very brightly. And to add more there were storms firing to the distant south and distant east. It's just a pitty so many hills, farm houses, and not being able to easily get close to a wind mill....let alone trying to get them in the shot with the storms and without power lines as well. Hence at least 50 miles driving in squares(gravel grids). Also ground fog was picking up. That would be a crazy shot with all that, but just the very bright Milkyway with storms and the wind mills was cool. And now it's almost 4 a.m. Zzzz

 

[Josh Richardson]

Pretty much the same here as everyone elses, was targeting near Humboldt Co. but realized eventually the main show would be the struggling cells near Fort Dodge a short distance to the south. After blasting SE for a while and waiting for this thing to get going we finally saw it produce a wall cloud with attendant funnel between Kamrar and Williams, TIV flew by as we were watching this one.

At this point, these pulse-like storms seemed to keep trading off the more dominant updrafts and after chasing this stuff towards Iowa Falls I thought the show might already be winding down so we stopped off in Iowa Falls to visit someone quick. Of course, this is when the report comes in of the TOR near Owasa and then also near Steamboat Rock....luckily we made it back out to 20 and flying east through the back edge of the core to catch up to this but no tornado in site. Just a broad area of rotation and occasional wall cloud like structures. Somewhere around Wellsburg or Steamboat Rock we blasted south and then east again on some county road(eventually goes to Holland), as I mentioned in the now thread we saw what could have been a ground circulation as we witnessed the same rotating rain curtains near Holland but then as we went north on (hwy 14 maybe) towards Dike(Drove past COD) and then just pulled over real quick...we couldnt really see anything in the rain that would be indicative of a tornado. Anyway, after hitting Hudson we finally called it a day as the storm was definitely crapping out now. Still havent had the time to go to through pictures but honestly I didnt take that many as we were constantly bouncing around so much just like everyone else, however, I need to go through video because I do vid of the farmstead damage of just W of Dike. Anyway, I'll post more on this later.