June 7th, 2015 Day of The Shelf Clouds

A somehwat questionable day as to whether or not we'd even chase, but with a local bullseye and a chance, we headed out the door with storms initiating over Stark and Knox Counties.

Tornadoes: 0

Largest Hail: N/A

Highest Wind Gust: 60-70 mph (estimated)

I don't remember the specifics of the setup, but I do remember somewhat veered surface winds out of the SSW. That's good enough in Illinois. One other detail I do remember from setup this day: the morning convection. I was really bummed that we had a line of storms moving through in the morning that could ruin the day...until I saw the shelf on the leading edge. Never have I seen such incredible shelf structure in my life. That could have been the only thing I'd seen that day and I would have been 100% satisfied. It was a wall-hanger.

Once that had moved through, and a few photos uploaded on to Facebook and Twitter, it was back to the potential afternoon convection. SPC had made several adjustments to their forecast through the day, from a pretty large Enhanced Risk early in the day, downgrading to Slight, but then bringing back a reasonably sized Enhanced as storms initiated.

We headed out once we saw initiation and waited for a while a little west of Varna, IL. Some of the convection took on supercellular characteristics as it crossed the Illinois River. Most of it was pretty short lived though, as linear appeared to be the predominant storm mode. Some supercell structures were present in the line(s) however, and we encountered an unexpected inflow band/maybe wall cloud south of Varna.

We followed this feature to Toluca and then decided to head south for another embedded supercell coming out of Peoria. We headed south for a while before I noticed a small inflow notch in the line to our west and a decent velocity signature. We pulled over near an intersection west of Benson to watch an awesome wall cloud coming directly at us.

We quickly bailed from our position once the wall cloud got close, and headed southeast a few miles. We were right in the path of the apex of a surging bow echo that served as the "RFD" for the wall cloud. There was also still a suspicious lowering at the intersection of the previous "FFD" and the "RFD" (putting them in quotation marks because it really wasn't a supercell, but had some characteristcs of one). Here's a frame grab of some of the shelf structure:

We let it roll over us with winds likely over 60 mph. Our vehicle, which was pointed into the wind, was rocking pretty well. Got some video outside my window, which can be seen late in the chase summary video below.

After we headed home, there were more cells coming at us from the northwest, so I eagerly awaited those as well. Once they arrived, the were one big congealed rain shower, but had some great shelf structure.

The rest of the evening also provided many photography opportunities. I'll finish this log out with some of the remaining photos from that night.