April 9th, 2017 Northwest Iowa Cap Bust
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: 1"
Highest Winds: ~50 mph
The setup for this day was nothing incredibly remarkable. Surface low forecast to situate itself somewhere across eastern Nebraska into western Iowa, southwest-to-northeast oriented dryline that draped from the low down into the southern Plains, moderate thermodynamics and moisture set to come in. A number of Norman chasers were excited about finally having chase prospects on their home turf, but we were more interested in the Iowa target just ahead of the low. Matt Magiera, Matt Zuro, Daniela Barrios, and I were messing around the night before and started to look over some model data, especially high-res CAMs (always a terrible idea to commit to a setup based on the ARW and NMMB 20 hours out). Many had big UDH tracks, and looking at the overall setup, it appeared that there was at least some potential. I was on spring break, and it was only a 6 hour drive to our target of Storm Lake, IA, so we figured it'd be worth a try for at least a good storm or two.
SPC issued a slight risk with a 2% tornado risk, about what we expected:
While waiting on the rest of them to pick me up from my house, I spent a little time photographing peach and cherry blossoms in my yard. Over half of my photos from this day are flowers.
We were off to Storm Lake. Very unremarkable drive out. We stopped at a Culvers in Cedar Rapids. Or was it Waterloo? I'm too lazy to check my GPS history. Basically, after about 6-7 hours and a couple of driver rotations, we made it to Sac City (ha) and then Storm Lake. The big lake there is pretty cool. The rancid smell of minced up farm animal from the Tyson plant was, uh...off-putting. We spent a few hours in Storm Lake waiting for initiation that never came. The cap was too strong. Cumulus started to get a little more agitated just north towards sunset, so we tried to catch some of it towards the Minnesota border. It all died. So we started driving back, sleep deprived from the night before. A couple hours into the drive, and some incoherent ramblings about Pod O (the one that intercepted the Sulphur, OK tornado the year prior), storms started firing along the I-35 corridor north of Des Moines, gaining some supercell structure. After getting some McDonald's, we went in for an intercept. I was eating fries when we got into position. There was some decent structure at times and some good lightning.
Matt and Matt (it's fun having two friends with the same first name) got some good shots, but I botched most of mine. We eventually left as we got overtaken by some quarter-sized hailstones.
I don't remember exactly what happened to the storm, but we started driving home, switching drivers from Magiera to me as he'd gotten no sleep the night before. I had, but I was tiring pretty quickly. Struggling to stay conscious on I-380, I stopped us at a gas station to try and wake up a bit. Here I made a big mistake. I thought drinking something sugary would be a good idea to stay awake. That was dumb. I downed a bottle of apple juice and was wide awake for about 20 minutes. Then came the sugar crash, followed by me almost falling asleep behind the wheel and just about going off the road. Daniela had to take the wheel after this, and she pulled it off better than the rest of could. I was knocked out in the backseat when we got to my house around 3 AM.
Dumb, miserable day that had a neat storm at least. I learned something important, though: always go for caffeine when driving. Sugar will get you killed.
SPC Storm Reports:
Why did we do this, again?
