July 13th, 2016 Central Illinois Squall Line

Tornadoes: 0

Highest Wind Gust: 40-50 mph

Largest Hail: N/A

Impromptu "chase" with Matt Magiera, Matt Zuro, and Daniela Barrios, mostly just as something fun to do. A squall line was intensifying across western Illinois as they decided to head down, picking me up along the way. We headed southward from my house to Varna, IL, turning west towards Henry. About halfway between Varna and Lacon, we pulled over on a back road to watch the distant shelf cloud move closer. It showed some very loose "supercell" structure, with a lowered cloud base north and an "RFD" surge to the south, and it was weakly rotating:

We pressed east to try and get ahead of it for some more shelf cloud shots. We ended up headed north once we got onto I-39, but immediately turned back south once we noticed a possible QLCS-type mesovortex a ways south. On the way, we noted a strange, incredibly rapid stream of condensation fly into the shelf cloud. Like tornadic upward motion. I have no idea what it was, but it was certainly not uninteresting. Shortly after, a small but intense gustnado formed in the field, which I got extremely blurry and shaky video of:

After chasing the line a bit further east, and letting it overtake us on a sketchy gravel back road, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings in Peru. We then went back to my house, where we were greeted to a beautiful mammatus display at sunset on the backside of the MCS:

Once it got dark, we decided it was time to mess around. We figured out that lightning smoke bombs and throwing them made for pretty pictures. Magiera volunteered to throw:

After hours of late summer night amusement, the three suburbians had to leave. Pretty good day for what I was expecting to be just a sit at home and do nothing day. Also, looking at SPC reports, this was a very impressive damaging wind event for the mid-Mississippi Valley. The St. Louis area is solid blue with wind reports.

Location History: