Tag Archives: storm chase

Chase results: 26 June 2021 near Hoopeston, IL

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On Friday, I was looking at the radar and I thought “gee, that storm a few miles away from me looks like it might have a little bit of rotation.” I talked myself out of it. This means, of course, that it produced two tornadoes an 18 minute drive from my house. On Saturday when I saw some storms getting their spin on in central Illinois, I refused to be fooled again. So I woke my girlfriend from a nap and we got in the car heading toward Paxton.

As we pulled into Hoopeston, I had a choice to make. There were some cells popping up from Paxton to Mahomet that looked interesting but not particularly spinny. The main squall line was meh except further north. I had to pick an option. My risks were basically “nothing happens” to the south or “stuff happens but you can’t see it” to the north. Given the choices, I decided to engage to the south.

Storm 1

  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 4:24 PM CDT.
  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 4:43 PM CDT. The circled storm was the first one I targeted after getting into Illinois.

We turned down IL 1 toward Rossville. I figured we’d cut west from there to get under the storms. Unfortunately, the storms were speeding up, and I quickly decided that staying near IL 9 was the better option. We took a county road back north and made it all the way to IL 9 when we encountered a flooded roadway. With John Fausett in mind, we turned around (and didn’t drown) after driving about half a mile in reverse. We picked the next county road west and went north.

The storm was near Rankin at this point and it seemed to be showing some signs of rotation. We stopped to watch it for a few minutes and saw some lowerings, but there was no spinning.

  • View to the north of the first storm. Taken at 5:14 PM CDT just south of IL 9 from N 1300 E Road.
  • Lowerings from the first storm. Taken at 5:17 PM CDT about 1 mile northwest of Hoopeston. View is to the north-northwest.
  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 5:26 PM CDT. Location and direction of view as given on the image.
  • View of the second storm from the first storm position. Taken at 5:28 PM CDT. View is to the southwest.

After a few minutes, it was time to reposition again. The storm had become uninteresting, so I decided to follow it’s friend slightly to the south. From our position looking southwest, it looked pretty nice.

Storm 2

We dropped south a bit to meet it and then followed east and a little north to watch it further. At that point, we were a little east of Wellington. The lowering maybe showed a little bit of weak rotation, but it was never obvious. After a few minutes, it became an mess.

  • Lowering from the second storm. Taken at 5:35 PM CDT from about 2 miles north of Hoopeston. View is to the northwest.
  • Screen shot of radar reflectivity (top) and storm relative velocity (bottom) from KILX at 5:38 PM CDT. Location and direction of view as given on the image.
  • Lowering from the second storm. Taken at 5:50 PM CDT from about 2 miles east of Wellington. View is to the northwest.
  • Lowering from the second storm. Taken at 5:51 PM CDT from about 2 miles east of Wellington. View is to the northwest.

The end

These storms were basically done (although there was a report of a funnel cloud near Earl Park, IN later). There were some tornado warnings in the line near Villa Grove. After driving through near-zero visibility on the east side of Hoopeston, we went south on IL 1 for a little bit. But after a few minutes, the line looked less interesting and it didn’t seem worth staying out for. Also, the bag of Combos that I ate was not a reasonable dinner.

We managed to beat the line back to Lafayette by 5-10 minutes. For an unplanned chase, I’m okay with how this turned out. I feel like the decisions I made were reasonable, which was not a given considering I haven’t seriously chased in ten-plus years. Missing a photogenic tornado minutes from my house still stings, but I feel good about doing this again in the future.

Ten years since Jamestown

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Ten years ago, I was sitting in my apartment on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. My last class of the day ended around 1:30 and I was settled in to get some work done on the forecast game that I ran for the University. WFO Lincoln had issued a few tornado warnings and there were reports of cold air funnels, so my friend Mike Kruze and I decided to spend the afternoon driving around getting rained on. Instead, we saw one of the most photogenic tornadoes ever recorded in Indiana. And then another one. And then a third (though this one is unofficial, since we could not see the ground from our position and no damage was observed in the empty field).

This was only two days after Mike and I had returned from a marathon drive to northern Iowa, where the most we saw was vivid lightning and large hail after sunset. By this point, I had been chasing for a year and a half. Chase attempts evolved from some undergrad doofuses piling in the car and driving around to a fairly mature venture with thoughtful forecasts, data stops, and real efforts to be in position. Of course, as luck would have it, April 20 ended up being somewhat of a doofus day. Mike had a data plan on his Sprint PCS phone, and it was just enough for us to pull up the occasional radar image. Without that, we’d never have found ourselves standing in rural Boone County with a tornado directly to our west.

At the time of the Jamestown tornado, FunnelFiasco.com wasn’t even a gleam in my eye. I was planning on making a career in the National Weather Service. I figured chasing would be a thing I did with regularity. Ten years on, I’ve earned my meteorology degree, but I’ve never worked as a professional in the field. I have one chase day in the last five years, and I’m less than a year from a decade-long tornado drought. I’ve still only chased west of the Mississippi twice. With a toddler and home and another baby due early summer, I’m not likely to get out this year. But I still feel the gentle tug of the storm, pulling me to go out and seek it. I know I will at some point. I just don’t know when.

Lightning photos added

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On Monday evening, Angie and I went chasing unexpectedly.  While the storm produced some wind damage, I’ve been unable to find confirmation of a tornado (there was at least one real-time report, though).  We saw very little of interest, until the incredible light show afterward.  So I present to you a few boring cloud pictures, plus also the lightning:

http://weather.funnelfiasco.com/chase/21jun10

This is also kind of exciting because for the first time I’ve forgone the use of tables to layout the photos.  The result is that the page renders based on what your screen wants it to, not on what I demand it does.  This is supposedly a much less evil way to do things.  In the future, I’ll be converting some of the older pages to work this way as well.

Further, I’ve updated some of the pages to reflect new license information.  Instead of my custom written “you must have my permission” text, I’m now licensing content under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.  It’s simpler, more enforceable, and more in line with my own personal values.  There’s a blog post forthcoming where I muse upon licensing issues.  In the meantime, know that the content on FunnelFiasco.com is under whatever license it says it is. I’ll work on updating the license text on pages soon.  And maybe I should consider a more dynamic site (e.g. using PHP) so that I don’t have to keep making these changes on each. freaking. individual. page.

Nugget Night update and links fixed

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A week late, the Nugget Night page has been updated.  These days it seems harder and harder to get to a massive quantity.  I spend the other 13 days trying to eat less, so pigging out doesn’t always mean what it used to.

Also, the links to the large version of the images on the 10 November 2002 chase page have been fixed.  You can now click on the images to the get “full sized” version.