As the remnants of Ike kept the South occupied Saturday, a stalled warm front and a sixty-knot 500 millibar jet max brought ample shear and helicities to lower Michigan and northern Indiana. My friend Kurt Hulst and I decided not to waste the opportunity. I don”t think either of us had high expectations, so I”m glad we took the risk of a late-season storm chase, because our decision was rewarded with a couple of very nice supercells.\r\n\r\nOur initial plan was to head down US 131 to northern Indiana, but a line of storms moving across Lake Michigan changed our minds. Watching the southernmost storm intensify on the radar, we did an about-face south of Constantine and headed back north. Good move, that. The storm developed a nice little hook with pronounced rotation, then backbuilt into a second storm which also went supercellular as the first one put down a confirmed tornado in Paw Paw.\r\n\r\nAs Kurt and I neared the new tail-end cell, we could see a nice wall cloud. This produced a squat, grayish-white funnel southeast of Portage as we tracked with it to the northeast. \r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe storm eventually crapped out around Battle Creek, at which point I was having connection problems and couldn”t access data.\r\n\r\nWe decided to abandon that storm and hook up with fellow-chaser Dave Diehl. We rendezvoused with him north of Coldwater, then headed south to intercept a new line of storms. By now, I had my data issues resolved, and I liked what I saw on GR3. Tail-end Charlie first showed rotation over–ironically (see my September 4 post)–Dunlap, Indiana, and it was heading into an area of progressively higher shear and helicity. Indications looked good that the storm would continue to organize.\r\n\r\nDropping south on I-69, we headed west on Route 120 for a few miles, and intercepted the storm east of Orland. It had a nice wall cloud and an elephant”s trunk funnel that extended about halfway to the ground. In the following shots, you can see what”s left of the funnel as the vigorously rotating meso starts wrapping in precipitation.\r\n\r\n
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\r\n\r\nWe wound up backtracking ahead of the meso eastward to Clear Lake, at which point the storm gusted out.\r\n\r\nAll in all, a very enjoyable mid-September chase–late in the season, but hopefully not the last chase of 2008.
