May 24th, 2015 Rochelle, IL Wall Cloud

Tornadoes: 0

Largest Hail: N/A

Highest Wind Gust: 20 mph (estimated)

This was a day where I was not initially expecting to chase, or really even thinking about chasing. I was actually sitting at a family cookout most of the day as some garden variety thunderstorms rolled over. I was expecting nothing but this for the remainder of the day. Once we got home I noticed on Twitter that we had a mesoscale discussion for our area and had a 2% tornado risk from the newest SPC update.

The MD resulted in a Tornado Watch not much time later.

I convinced my sister to drive us chasing as we targeted a cell with a rotation signature on radar near Princeton as it was headed toward the warm front. We finally got a visual on a white wall cloud near LaMoille. It never did anything much, but it was a beautiful sight.

We finally made it north of Rochelle after the storm was north of the warm front and called it a chase. However, we did find some of the damage from the April 9th EF4 that ripped through the same area.

I've never gotten a chance to go through the damage path in-depth, but for nearly 2 months later, there was quite a bit of damage left over. We headed south on I-39 and made it to Mendota where my sister wanted to stop at a wind farm for some pictures.

We headed back down I-39 on the way home and got a pretty cool shelf cloud at dusk as a band of unimpressive linear storms pushed though.

Not an overly exciting chase but as I've said many times, it was better than sitting at home!