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6/21/2010

 
 
 
Today was a very unexpected chase day.  I had the day off, and had spent most of the day just being lazy and lounging around on the couch.  Earlier in the day a weak band of thunderstorms passed through the area, and I figured that would wipe away the best instability until later on in the evening.  The overall severe risk was sort of marginal today anyway, with the highest threat for severe weather coming more from straight-line winds as opposed to tornadoes. 
 
Well, by mid-afternoon the atmosphere very rapidly destabilized over eastern Iowa and northeast Missouri.  A vigorous upper disturbance was passing quickly to the north in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  A trailing edge of height falls and vorticity advection, combined with the strong surface destabilization lead to rapid thunderstorm development in eastern Iowa.  I just got done watching a movie on HBO, and decided to check the radar on my phone, while still sitting on the couch lol.  I noticed a pretty respectable looking storm blowing up over far southeast Iowa west of Burlington.  It was isolated, and had the appearance of being supercellular in nature.  With every scan of the radar it looked better and better, and before long it was severe warned.  It quickly went tornado warned soon after, and around that time Jeremy and I had been texting back and forth about heading south after it.  He was still at work, but it was now after 4pm, so he was able to leave a bit early. 
 
We met up in Colona, and proceeded to blast south on I-74.  Already a very large anvil was overspreading the southern sky.  The storm was still over 60 miles away, but you could see the updraft even from that far off.  The storm had sent off a pretty cool looking left-split that went rocketing northward towards the QC.  I wish I took a picture of that.  You could clearly tell it was anticyclonic (as almost all left-splits are) as the updraft base was on the north side of the storm.  
 
We made good time heading south on I-74, and soon pushed south of Galesburg on state route 41.  We began to slowly outflank it on the eastern side south of Galesburg.  We played it very good, as we only drove through some light rain under the forward flank downdraft region.  Just west of us very heavy rain and probably some large hail was falling.  
 
Here's a few shots near Bushnell Illinois looking west-southwest at the storm.
 
 
 
 
 
Now heading west on route 136 about 10 miles east of Macomb Illinois.
 
 
 
 
As we approached Macomb the structure of the monstrous supercell became increasingly impressive.
 
 
 
The above pictures just don't do the storm structure justice.  I REALLY need to get a wide-angle lens!  The multilayer striations and banding of this monster supercell was simply incredible.  The amount of electricity this thing was producing was extraordinary too.  A very frequent barrage of cloud to ground lightning bolts shot out of this storm.  There were even some large bolts coming out of the anvil out in front of the storm.  It was a bit nerve racking to say the least being near this thing.
 
 
 
Just east of Macomb here.  
 
 
 
 
We were only in the above location a short time due to very close lightning.  We also wanted to position a bit further to the southeast anyway since this thing was now moving almost southeasterly.  
 
Here's where it gets very interesting.  I shot this soon after leaving the Macomb location as we just started heading south on route 67.  This is looking west at what appears to be a tornado.  This photo was snapped at 6:51pm according to the time stamp.  At 6:58pm a report of "trees being lofted into the air" was reported to the NWS just west of Macomb.  
 
This is a highly contrasted photo to bring out what appears to be a tornado.  To me there's not too much doubt that this was in fact a tornado.
 
 
 
 
We stayed on the storm for well over another hour as it pushed southeast of the Macomb area.  There were additional reports of tornadoes, but we never saw anything other than brief rapid rotation from the wall clouds that tried to tighten up as new RFDs cut in.  The storm sure looked like it wanted to do something big, but due to the lack of decent winds below 850mb it seemed to lack the low-level wind shear needed to produce anything other than brief tornadoes.  
 
 
One last picture of a wall cloud near Industry Illinois that was attempting to tighten up.  You can see the RFD knifing in on the left side of the wall cloud.  This thing got to spinning very nicely, but just as soon as it looked like a tornado was evident the RFD would completely cut off the inflow to the area of rotation.
 
 
 
 
Around 8:30pm or so we decided to call it a day and head back home.  It was sort of ironic how we didn't plan on chasing today.  We ended up having a pretty fun little chase with a very nice supercell (and possibly a tornado) not too far from home, and yet the day before we drove to Nebraska and back basically for nothing.