June 12, 2013 High Risk Chase
Date: June 12, 2013
Partner: My Dad
Location: Granville to Sandwich, IL
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: 1/4"
Highest Wind Gust: 31 MPH (measured)
Start of the Chase Day:
I woke up at about 8 AM, and, as always, went straight to my laptop, and studied weather data. SPC forecasts, some mesoanalysis, and radar were all I looked at all day, except for eating and maybe taking a walk outside to check on the skies. These were the highest tornado probabilities I had ever seen for Northern Illinois (I'm 14, give me a break! Also, 11/17/13 surpassed these). What really shocked me, however, was the 60% damaging wind probability. It seemed as if a powerful derecho could evolve from the initial supercells. Time would tell. At about 2 PM, storms began to pop up, including a tornado warned storm that produced a brief tornado near PawPaw. However, my dad still wasn't home from work. I was growing very worried since I didn't want to miss such an extreme outbreak. He finally arrived at 3 PM, and we got out the door until about 3:30, VERY much later than I would've liked.
The Chase:
I was eyeing some developing supercell structures in Bureau County. We were already far enough south, so instead I focused on moving east. I watched multiple cumulus towers explode into thunderstorms on I-80 between Peru and Ottawa. They all had well defined updrafts and downdrafts and were textbook strong to severe thunderstorms. They were riding just behind the PawPaw storm, which was now a line with embedded rotation. We turned north on the Ottawa exit, and got north of town.
I looked to our east and noticed something very interesting- a wall cloud! I was unable to see if it was rotating or not since we were driving pretty fast, and since a storm's rain/hail core caught up to us, obscuring it. It was at this time that pea sized hail began to fall. We turned east at the next available intersection to get out of the rain. I saw on radar that these storms were backbuilding into the PawPaw storm, and weren't going to remain isolated enough for tornadoes. We noticed another cluster formed to our west and went Severe Thunderstorm warned. We decided to find an open area for observing winds and possible hail, a few miles south of Sandwich. I set up our "probe" with an anemometer out in a field near our vehicle to measure wind speeds.
When the storm hit us, a considerable rise in wind speeds was noted. Nothing too extreme, but enough to film for certain projects. No hail with this cell, so I was a little disappointed after it passed. We picked up the "probe" and retrieved the maximum wind speed data, which read 31.1 MPH. It was something.
We decided to take the drive home on I-80 once again, and noticed something else very interesting. This time- it was a dying shelf cloud. It was very low- probably a few hundred feet off of the ground. We watched it as it passed, then noticed a new shelf cloud developing to our north. It was extremely photogenic, so we stopped north of Utica to snap some pictures. It made me realize that tornadoes aren't everything. There are so many elements and breathtaking structures that go into these powerful beasts. If a chase's success was based solely off of tornado sightings, nobody would be doing it. That's why we should appreciate every storm's beauty, even if it does look like a linear multicell high precipitation load of crap!
