May 30, 2013 Bureau County Gustnadoes
Date: May 30, 2013
Partner: My Dad
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: N/A
Highest Wind Gust: 24 MPH (measured)
Start of the Chase Day:
There was a Slight Risk for severe weather across Northern Illinois. It wasn't too extreme, and the main action was back over Oklahoma. (This was the same storm system that would unfortunately take the lives of Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young the next day). Despite the somewhat low severe risk, I still monitored the situation vigilantly. Eventually, a squall line developed over Iowa, and moved into Illinois. It produced a few tornadoes as well as widespread damging winds along its path. The storms were over Eastern Henry County when I decided to make the move to go north.
The Chase:
This one didn't go too far away from the starting position. We took Route 89 north to Spring Valley and turned left at the stoplight. We then turned left just outside of town, taking us past Seatonville and eventually into Hollowayville. The storms were approaching quickly, so we found a wide open space on a north-south road just north of town.
There was a high-based, disorganized shelf cloud a few miles to our west. It was much less than I expected. My radar wasn't updating, but I could tell the storms were weakening based on their structure. I decided to put the anemometer probe out anyway. I was pretty disappointed by the dying storms, but we stayed put in case anything were to unfold. The chances of this were small.
The small strip of leftover shelf cloud now passed overhead. The winds picked up, just as expected. I stood to the side of the car filming just in case something were to happen. And then it DID- a brown swirling mass was located about a third of a mile to our northeast. It was a gustnado, a swirling area of dust created by the winds on the front edge of a thunderstorm. Often mistaken for tornadoes, these beasts can have winds up to near 80 MPH under the right conditions. They have been known to cause property damage. This was most likely weaker, but still noteworthy.
I screamed at my Dad to move north to get a better visual of it. I wanted to do it a quickly as possible, since I didn't know how long they'd last. Once we made it about a mile up the road, or about a half mile south of I-80, I got out and filmed once again. Apparently, as we were driving, 2 more gustnadoes had formed. One kept going through cycles of strengthening and weakening, while the other one was smaller but also stronger than the original. This gustnado had very visible counter-clockwise rotation, even on a video camera filming from a little over half a mile away. Apparently, they had also crossed the interstate, since a few cars were pulled over, and the gustnadoes were north of the interstate when they were originally to the south.
The rain core of these storms now moved in, with moderate downpours, showing that indeed these storms were winding down. We headed back toward Spring Valley and eventually home. When we got there, my Mom asked me if we saw what people saw on Facebook. People were saying there were tornadoes across Bureau County since they didn't know better. Even though they weren't tornadoes, they were still extremely interesting phenomena, and were an amazing sight to see!
