Hello all,
Victor Gensini and I had been eyeing Saturday for a couple of days before,
as models started to trend towards a solution of a warm front across central
Illinois and a surface low south of the Quad Cities at 0Z Sunday, 6/6/10.
Everything was in place except good low level lapse rates, but with
good to excellent shear, instability, a warm front to play on with a strong
shortwave trough approaching, what was not there to like?
So I met Vic in Princeton, IL at about noon. Already, there was trouble brewing: his laptop was toasted the night before by a software installation gone
wrong that train wrecked his computer. He had to reinstall everything.
Worse, his wireless Internet wasn't working.
And to top things off, I forgot the power cable to my computer.
The solution was that I used Vic's power supply for his laptop,
and my wireless Internet connection. With the technical glitches
managable...
We left for our target, Burlington, IA. We take I-74 to U.S. 34. For the two
times we have chased together, we missed the turnoff to keep on going west
of 34, and wound up on 67 south and went into Macomb. Dear IDOT: place
SIGNAGE to let people know where to go! There is only one that says the
junction is coming up. Sheesh! So, we took state route 9 and backtracked into Burlington, and then to Mt. Pleasant.
As this happens, we see the developing line of storms to the northwest across central Iowa and the anvil cirrus spreading over us, limiting heating. Then, we see Matt, Walker and Trip
3 from the College of DuPage at the Dairy Queen. After a most pleasant visit with them, COD heads out for parts unknown. As we watch a band of light showers from the
Quad Cities to Mt. Pleasant, despair looms as the line to our northwest
looks like total crud, despite Tim Marshall's report of a multi-vortex
tornado crossing I-35. Anyway, we see one of
the showers get a little heavier just to our east and just in case that develops into anything, we head back east and "core punch" this shower.
After we cross the Mississippi River, I look at my road map for options. But then I look off to my left, past Vic, who is driving...and see a rain free base from our little shower. And it doesn't look bad! Glancing back at GR3, I see a 53 dbZ core on it. More ominously, it's starting to get significant rotation! Just then, I look off to my west-northwest...and I don't think it was, but...what appeared to be a brief landspout might have occurred. I can't verify it, so I keep my trap shut, so as not to sound silly (I later learn Vic saw that and had the exact same thought!). I'm more convinced it wasn't, though. But as we continue east, that shower became a thunderstorm, it started rotating, and we drove under the meso twice trying to get ahead of it. As we pull off to watch it develop, Matt Piechota and friends pull up to let us know they have MS Streets and Trips. We alternated back and forth from that point on being "leader", but as my maps became useless, they took over the charge. Finally, just after 7:30 PM, as I am looking at radar and trying to figure out where the heck we are on our road maps (Vic and I didn't think we'd need the "Roads of Illinois" maps, sigh), Vic yells tornado, and I miss the brief spin up. Then we head east some more, and again, a brief spin up. NWS counts them all as one EF-0 spin up. OK. Finally, as he's driving, I see one that he misses.
After 15 minutes of brief tornadic spin-ups being reported by spotters (we called our rotating wall cloud into the NWS, who were surprised by our report at the time), the storm updraft base becomes phenomenal looking (see Walker Ashley's blog and other chasers for those excellent views and shots), and at 7:58-ish PM, we see our first significant
tornado of the day. After watching it for a few minutes and taking pictures, which you saw on my website, we hop back in the car. We lose sight of it from time to time as we drive through trees, but we catch up to it at Elmwood, as it hits the city head on. I called these multiple tornadoes, but the NWS damage survey says it's all one big one, so this is our second tornado. As we swing through town trying to get through the damage path, I catch a glimpse of two-story buildings with the second floor ripped off. This tornado was rated high-end EF-2, primarily due to the damage in Elmwood. We then followed the storm and watched it occlude, with a new meso developing. That produces a large multi-vortex tornado east of Elmwood. This one, ranked EF-1, started at 8:10 PM and was on the ground for 8 minutes. Finally, as darkness fell, we caught sight of the tornado northwest of Peoria near Edwards. That one hits at 8:26 PM both Vic and I caught one glimpse of it as it just misses the community of Edwards and lifts just before getting into Peoria.
After that, we call it quits as it becomes too dangerous with 50 MPH tornadic storms at night with little lightning on our supercell. We celebrate with a dinner at Steak 'n Shake in Ottawa, IL,
but it's muted as we learn more of the big supercells up closer to I-80, and then the view of a 190 knot shear signature on the meso as it approached Kankakee. The reports of damage from Streator and Dwight also started flowing from local storm reports, and Vic was relieved that his house was missed...apparently, by a half mile or so from the supercell that hit Streator et al.
So per the NWS, our final tornado count is at 4. Pix are already out, I hope to have more video later.
http://weather.admin.niu.edu/gilbert/06052010tornadoes/
