4/4/2010
First chase of 2010! We were pretty excited to get back out on the road after a long, cold Winter. We knew deep moisture was going to be a bit of a problem this day, but we still set out in hopes that something exciting would happen. The best storms were expected to fire down in Missouri, but due to the fact that it was Easter, we got a pretty late start.
I didn't get to Jeremy's house in East Moline until about 2:30. We quickly hit the road and jumped on I-74 south towards Galesburg. Already some elevated storms were firing southwest of the Quad Cities, and quickly went severe warned. At Galesburg we jumped on route 34 and headed west into Iowa through Burlington. By that time a broken line of storms had fired from near Iowa City down to about Kirksville Missouri. It didn't take long for them to become severe, and at that point the question was which storm do we go after. As we approached Mt. Pleasant a big decision was to be made. Do we keep heading west towards a intense looking cell east of Ottumwa, or take a chance at the cells to the south. Even though the cell east of Ottumwa looked great at the time, we elected to head south towards the better instability. It ended up being the right decision, as the cell east of Ottumwa quickly became absorbed into the coalescing line of storms in eastern Iowa.
Soon it became apparent that the best storm was in far northeast Missouri, heading right towards Keokuk Iowa. We pushed south towards Keokuk, trying to outflank the supercell as it approached quickly from the west. There were reports of golfball sized hail with it, so we definitely wanted to beat the FFD core before it crossed the highway. A few miles north of Keokuk we could begin to see a lowering on the southern side of the storm, just as we were passing in front of the core quickly approaching from the west.
As we continued southward, we could now see a pretty fat wall cloud to the west. This is when it looked the healthiest.
A black and white rendition
It wasn't much longer after this that the wall cloud got obliterated by cold outflow. This is just north of Keokuk.
We kept just ahead of the storm as we passed through the town of Keokuk over into Illinois. There were a few times when the RFD core was literally a few blocks behind us as we passed through Keokuk. We were trying our best to stay ahead of it as we knew there could be some large hail in there.
After crossing into Illinois we were able to get a few miles ahead of the very quick moving storm. We pulled over near Colchester and snapped some pics. The storm definitely had supercellular characteristics, but seemed pretty elevated. The low wall cloud from before was a distant memory, and all that remained was a very high rain-free base. It did show some interesting striations though, and it was very apparent that it was rotating.
We continued east for awhile, staying just ahead of it until we approached Macomb. It was at that point we decided to let it go, as it was apparent it wasn't going to produce.
All in all not a bad first chase. We were pretty happy with how our strategy worked out. I think we definitely picked the best storm, with the exception of the cells in central Missouri. Obviously we got way too late of a start to reach those. It was nice to see some supercell action again after the long, and cold Winter.
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