You gotta love chases close to home, especially with gas prices hovering near $4/gallon.  May 22nd turned out to be a great local setup.  Deep layer shear was very nice, and there

was more than enough instability for strong supercells.  One concern I had the night before the chase was early storm initiation shown by the NAM/WRF guidance.  The reason it was 

blowing storms up so early was due to relatively weak convective inhibition, or "cap" if you will.  The GFS and other hi-res models indicated the cap holding on a little later into the afternoon,

which was exactly what ended up happening.  When storms fire too early in the day they tend to be weaker and less organized, due to lesser instability and too much storm competition.  

 

I met Jeremy in East Moline late morning, and then picked up his cousin Mike Ludin, who also lives in East Moline.  We hit I-80 west in Davenport by noonish, and headed out to a little west of 

Iowa City.  A nice cumulus field had been festering all morning underneath the building instability.  Surface winds were pretty gusty out of the south with the approach of the surface trough.  We

stopped at the rest area just west of Iowa City around 1pm or so. 

 

We were a bit early so we killed some time by playing some three-way catch with the baseball.  

 

Time kind of got away from us, and we ended up playing catch for almost an hour LOL.  A quick check of the radar revealed that storms were beginning to fire about a county

to our west.  We quickly jumped in the truck and blasted west down I-80 towards three quickly developing supercells.  The northern one was the strongest at this point, and was 

severe warned as we approached it south of Victor Iowa.

 

 

The first storms of the day going up.  This is as we were blasting west on I-80.  The largest anvil just left of the interstate was the dominate storm at first.  You can also see some 

anvils just left of it.  There were two weaker supercells developing there, which would eventually merge into one large supercell and produce a tornado.

 

 

 

 

We took exit 201 off I-80 southeast of Brooklyn Iowa and found a nice open location to view the storm as it approached from the west.  The wall cloud continued to 

organize and started to look very nice.  The whole rain-free updraft base was twisted and quite large, albeit a bit elevated looking.  Rotation in the wall cloud looked 

pretty weak, but with the way it looked we figured it had a good chance.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

We sat and watched the above wall cloud/supercell for a good 15 minutes, but it just didn't seem like it was motivated to do anything.  That combined with the fact it was

now raining on us from the tops of the storms just to our south sort of made us think this storm wasn't going to produce.  We figured the inflow was getting cut off by those

storms immediately to the south.  The wall cloud became rather flat and disorganized looking, so at that point we defected from the storm for what looked like a better 

opportunity to the south.  We found out later on that this original storm quickly reorganized and went on to produce an EF-2 rated tornado near Ladora Iowa.  It must 

have maintained just enough separation from the cells to the south that the inflow remained uncontaminated.  

 

 

We had to blast east on I-80 for a good 10-15 miles to get out of the forward flank rain/hail moving in from the two cells just to the south.  Speaking of those two cells,

they began to merge into one large supercell northwest of Sigourney Iowa.  It began to look very impressive on radar, and it had full access to the high theta-e air flowing up 

from the south since there weren't any storms close to it.  

 

We took the 220 exit off of I-80 and blasted south towards Parnell Iowa.  We had to punch through some heavy rain and small hail from the forward flank of the large supercell

moving in at us, but we escaped the large hail that was no doubt falling just to the west.  We found a nice back road on a hill top about a half mile north of Parnell, and had a 

FANTASTIC view to the west.  We had just come out of the heavy rain and hail at this point, but we could clearly see a lowering to the west-southwest heading right us.

 

 

 

We were now out of the main rain/hail core, but interestingly enough we would still get the occasional chunk of marble to quarter size hail hitting around us from time

to time.  The wall cloud began to organize as it approached, and rotation was quite evident from the get go.  This storm had everything going for it, so we figured it was 

only a matter of time before it produced.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see in the above pictures how the wall cloud became much lower and "blocky" looking as the rotation began to tighten up.  The RFD (on the left side of the pic)

finally began to wrap around the east side of the wall cloud and it wasn't long before the first funnel dropped.  

 

 

 

 

 

The narrow funnel continued to descend as the RFD roared around the east side of the meso.  It was only a matter of a minute or so before it touched down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tornado lifted momentarily, but it was quickly approaching our location so we jumped back in the truck and blasted south.