June 20th, 2015 Iowa Tornado and Damaging Winds

Tornadoes: 1

Largest Hail: N/A

Highest Wind Gust: 75 mph (estimated)

Accomplishment: First chase outside of Illinois

I would not have chased this setup hadn't I needed more driving hours for my license. I had about 10 out of 50 required driving hours for my license and my 16th brithday had already passed. It was Saturday and my dad agreed, so off to Iowa we went.

The SPC issued an Enhanced Risk of severe storms across portions of Iowa and northwest Illinois. This included 5% tornado probablilities and 30% hatched hail probabilities.

A southeastward moving cold front was pushing into Iowa with winds backing out ahead of it. The biggest concern of mine was morning convection, as some severe storms (I believe they were elevated supercells) produced large hail across portions of the DVN CWA. Thankfully the anvil blowoff from these storms wasn't very expansive. As we crossed the border into Iowa on I-80, we noticed clouds were breaking up a bit, and once we made it to Iowa City, they had pretty much broken up altogether. We headed south and west from Iowa City to close in on the outflow boundary leftover from the storms. This led us to to North English, IA, where we decided to eat lunch at a local small ice cream shop. It was a very sticky atmosphere with a glorious southeast breeze. I felt good about our positioning and optimistic about the potential. Outflow boundaries are big targets in Illinois during the summer, but then again this is Iowa, the land of lies and disappointment. An MD was issued for an 80% chance of a Tornado Watch.

Monitoring mesoanalysis (with really crappy reception out there), towers were starting to grow to our northwest in a 3000-4000 CAPE environment. We went north as to put those storms into play if it came to it, but not too far as to also keep the boundary in play. Basically right on I-80, in Victor, IA. New towers were developing into storms along the boundary, to our southwest, as the Tornado Watch finally went up.

The southwestern storm was the one to be on, so we took many gravel roads to intercept it. Better than dirt roads, not nearly as good as Illinois' paved road grid. Several CGs were being spit out in the distance in front of a black core. It was organizing and was becoming a supercell. Once we got ahead of it, we decided to pull over to watch a distant and low contrast wall cloud with a farmer frantically rushing to finish his crop maintinence in the field beside us. The storm was becoming HP, so I was happy to even have any view of the updraft. We again repositioned to near Kirkville, where we again watched the still distant wall cloud roll closer, CGs blasing the landscape left and right.

Another reposition and a wrong turn later, we made it to Highway 63 southeast of Eddyville. We hit quite the chaser convergence here. There were probably about 15 vehicles parked within a reasonable distance of us, and a line of them pushing southeast to get further ahead. A monstrous inflow band/transitioning into a shelf cloud was steamrolling forward, along with a black and bright green rain core behind. I was watching where the RFD and inflow areas met for any signs of anything tornadic. As we watched, a woman with a carload of people pulled up to ask about the storm. I told her that there wasn't any tornado and that they could delay getting hit by the storm if they moved southeast down the highway. And what do you know, 15 seconds after I told her there wasn't a tornado, a plume of dust rose under the RFD/inflow intersection to our west. At the time, I just thought it was outflow, as the storm was becoming much more linear. This was actually an EF1 tornado. Welp.

I told her we needed to go as the storm was now bearing down on us. It now went full-on linear beast mode as it began producing pretty significant straight line winds. Highway 63 southeast-bound was a chaser traffic jam. Okay, not really a traffic jam, but it was pretty crowded. Every time we decided to stop for some photos/video, it was on us with 60 mph winds within a minute. We watched many other chasers do the same: stop, get out for 30 seconds, take as many shots as they could, then run. Here are some of the photos we got from doing so:

At some point near Ottumwa, we coincidentally met up with the College of DuPage chase group, and I had quite the time with it since I was already chatting with some of the students on Facebook. We paralleled them for some time and they eventually took and exit before we hit Mt. Pleasant. I noticed a bit of a circulation to our west coming toward Mt. Pleasant. We had gone awhile without stopping, so we had quite a bit of time before it hit. We pulled over off the ramp into the town and sure enough, there was a rotating lowering with a comma-shaped shelf cloud wrapping into it. We were watching when Adam Lucio's hail-caged vehicle whizzed by, apparently trying to get closer. I, on the other hand, wanted to get blasted by the winds as we were in town so we got the full experience of what the wind could do. I was not disappointed. Soon after the winds started, shingles started flying off of motels down the street. My camera was pointed in a different direction at the time, but I was still able to catch some. Shortly afterward, there was a power flash. Not long after that, the power went out. Video clip of the encounter:

You can see the ruffled shingles regarless of whether or not I captured the majority of them flying off. Also, the rotating lowering is featured at the beginning of the video.

We made a wrong turn that led us 10 miles out of the way after the encounter, so catching back up was virtually impossible. We followed just behind the storms as we crossed back into Illinois, and did report more wind damage along Highway 34. There were some beautiful views at sunset just west of Galesburg. It included an orange sunset and pink double rainbow. I got some cruddy shots since it was raining and sicne we were moving.

We finally arrived home around 10 PM.

I had no clue we had seen a tornado until a day or two afterward when the Des Moines NWS confirmed the EF1 near Eddyville. I posted the link in the Stormtrack chat and quickly pieces of the unsolved puzzle came together for many chasers, including myself. Adam Lucio was actually very close to the tornado, and finally got confirmation that that was what it was. The time stamp of the video file matched up as well. After a little conversing with Adam and Ben Holcomb on Facebook, I was able to confirm that it was likely the tornado.

I beat Lieowa on my first chase there.

Score:

Me: 1

Lieowa: 0

NWS track and summary of the tornado: