Storm Chasing in Illinois on Wednesday

The formidable system that ground out large, violent tornadoes in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas on Tuesday will move east on Wednesday to bring another round of severe weather to southeast

Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. And finally–finally!–I’m in a position to do some storm chasing. Financial constraints have majorly crimped my expeditions so far this season, but no way am I missing tomorrow.

Based on Tuesday morning’s NAM run, I’d been eyeballing Effingham, Illinois, as a preliminary target for trolling the I-70 corridor. The sounding for that area looked mighty pretty, as you can plainly see.

Now, however, with the 00Z runs in, I’m inclined to shift farther east near Terre Haute. Here’s another model sounding, courtesy of TwisterData, for near Oblong, Illinois. Maybe not quite as sexily backed at the surface as the Effingham sounding, but with stronger low-level winds and definitely quite functional. Maps of 500 mb winds and SBCAPE (see below) paint in a little more detail and suggest that near the Illinois/Indiana border is a good choice.

Tomorrow morning’s data will tell all. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to get my ugly-rest. I am so excited about the prospect of finally getting out and feeling the moisture, watching cumulus towers erupt and organize into glowering supercells, and hopefully videotaping some tornadoes out on the flat, wide-open Illinois prairie! A good night’s sleep and then I’m off in the morning.

Sax and Wedge: Maybe This Year

This afternoon I have a gig with Paul Lesinski at the Amway Grand. I’m looking forward to it, but it indisposes me to chase what could be Michigan’s first round of severe weather this afternoon. Practically speaking, the “storm” and “horn” parts of Stormhorn sometimes conflict with each other. I can’t do two things at once; I can’t play a gig and chase storms, and when I post here about one subject, then the other half of my readership gets left out.

Yet I view the two interests as connected in spirit, to such an extent that one of my life goals is to get some footage and/or photos of me playing my sax out on the Plains with a big wedge churning in the background. Given how active this April has been, maybe 2011 will be the year when I fulfill that ambition. I almost always bring my horn with me on my long-distance chases for just that reason (plus, yeah, I like to get in some sax practice when I can). The one notable occasion when I left it home last year was on May 22, a milemarker in my chase career. Unfortunately, the vehicle was so packed that there was no room for the horn, and given how events unfolded out there by Roscoe, it was probably just as well.

Today my buddy Bill is chasing down in Arkansas. Yesterday he filmed a large, violent wedge that hit the town of Vilonia. Round two today looks to be at least as bad, and I hope Bill stays safe. I don’t have a good feeling about what lies in store for the folks in that region. But I won’t be following any of the developments because I’ll be doing the other thing I love as much as storm chasing: playing my saxophone. This time of year the storm chaser in me has the edge over the musician, but once I’ve got my horn in my hands I forget everything else and just go with the flow of the music. Playing jazz is one of the most in-the-moment experiences a person can have, and I get tremendous satisfaction out of being a practitioner.

Afterwards maybe I’ll still get a crack at whatever weather shapes up. Probably not; today, such as it is, looks like it’ll play out on the eastern side of the state.  But I’ll take my gear with me to the gig just in case.

While I Was Out Chasing Sunday’s Storms…

Win a few, lose a few, the saying goes. Maybe so, but when it comes to chasing storms in Michigan, sometimes the losses seem just flat-out absurd.

Take this last Sunday, for instance. Kurt Hulst and I traveled over a hundred miles in order to intercept a storm down by Plainwell and track with it through the jungles of Allegan and Barry Counties, searching for a decent location for viewing. Meanwhile, a cell blew up just to our north and put down a tornado just four miles southwest of my apartment in Caledonia. If that isn’t a swift kick in the pratt with the steel-toed boot of irony, I don’t know what is.

True, it was a weak tornado; and true, it was probably rain-wrapped and hard to see; and true, it lasted only a minute or so, and catching it would have been pure serendipity. But still…just four freeking miles away… In the words of the inimitable Charlie Brown, “AAAUUUGGHHHHH!!!”

Sunday wasn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to me, either. A few years ago, I was heading back north through Indiana, homeward bound from a futile chase, when my buddy Bill Oosterbaan called to inform me that a tornado had just passed through Caledonia. If I had been home, I could have stepped outside my sliding door and watched it blow through a couple blocks to my east. But no, that would have been too simple. I had to go gallivanting all over the countryside in search of what, in my absence, was delivered gift-wrapped to my backyard.

Chase storms for a while and you’ll find yourself collecting flukes, ironies, hindsights, and head-banging experiences like some people collect porcelain animals. It just goes with the territory, particularly if you live in the Great Lakes, where picking a chase target is nine times out of ten just an educated crapshoot.

Well, what the heck–at least Kurt and I saw a fairly impressive wall cloud east of Plainwell, out near West Gilkey Lake. We were too far away to confirm rotation, but the cloud was morphing rapidly, displaying obvious rapid motion. For a minute I thought it might even be putting down a tornado, but at our distance, we couldn’t make out enough details to know one way or the other. I called in a report to KGRR, then watched the storm fizzle and die shortly after.

Here one second, gone the next–that’s how it goes here in Michigan, supercell heaven of the Midwest.

Back Yard Chase with Possible Wall Cloud

I hadn’t planned to chase storms today, but Kurt Hulst made me an offer too good to turn down, and off we went. For all the hoopla, with a tornado watch covering most of Indiana and Ohio and a 10 percent tornado risk outlined in exactly the same area south of the Michigan border as last week, the storms nevertheless turned out to be pretty garden variety.

In fact, nothing materialized south of us where we expected it to. Instead, Kurt and I got pleasantly surprised when a couple of cells fired up to our west near Plainwell and almost immediately took on supercellular characteristics. A southwest-northeast-oriented outflow boundary was working its way east, and it provided convergence that fired up a slowly growing line of storms in the weakly unstable warm sector.

We locked onto a promising-looking cell in central Michigan whose top, at between 40-45,000 feet, was the highest of the day. Base level SRV showed on-again/off-again weak circulation for this storm, and reflectivity had it

hooking nicely at different times. It was no monster supercell, but it had its moments. I took photos of a nice lowering while parked just south of the intersection of R Drive and 23 Mile Road 12 miles south of Charlotte. I’d call the feature a wall cloud. While I couldn’t verify rotation, the vertical motion and the position of the lowering just south of the rain shaft under the updraft base were pretty suggestive.

What you see was as good as it got. I reported the lowering to KGRR after taking the photos, but the storm began to crap out on us even as I was talking with the meteorologist. We dropped it a few minutes later and headed south to catch a new, developing cell. We’d probably have done better to stick with what we had, as it appeared to strengthen again briefly on radar while the new one went linear right away.

Chases in Michigan more often than not prove to be just entertaining diversions–fun, but it ain’t Kansas, Toto. This one fit that description. It was good to get out with Kurt, and also good to get home without having spent too many miles chasing nothing of any consequence.

Another Lower Great Lakes Storm System

The eastern Great Lakes looks to be once again under the gun for severe weather, with a setup that looks reminiscent of last week’s, albeit with some variations. The low is weaker but there’s juicier moisture, helicities may integrate a little better with instability, and it seems to me that the 500 mb jet is better positioned. Once again, though, surface winds veer rapidly south of the warm front, so while the mechanism for another batch of supercells is in place, the tornado potential is less certain. The SPC convective outlook shows a 5% tornado risk. That seems about right, though maybe part of the area will get upgraded this afternoon.

After looking at the morning NAM and RUC, I once again like the area south of Toledo. Bowling Green was my initial target last week, and I’d pick it again this week if I wanted to drive that far. If I chase storms at all today, I may just wind up dropping south down 131 toward the warm front, depending.

By the way, I haven’t posted a thing about Monday’s tornado fest in Oklahoma and I probably should. I wasn’t there to experience it, but my buddies Kurt Hulst and Bill Oosterbaan teamed up for it, and Ben Holcomb made it down there as well, and everyone scored. Bill tells me that he and Kurt saw seven confirmed tornadoes.

Me, I watched the outbreak unfold on the radar and ate my heart out. It really was a heck of a thing to observe. The SRVs were jaw-dropping, and I saw one low-level Delta velocity of 177 knots. Those storms were the real deal, and a huge contingent of chasers was on them. Among the highlights was the Wakita, OK, multi-vortex that a number of chasers captured on video. The clips I’ve seen show what looks like a basketful of snakes dancing.

Unfortunately, five people died in the storms. If there’s anything positive that can be said about the loss of life, it’s that the paths of the storms through mostly rural areas no doubt kept casualties lower than they could have been. One supercell dropped tornadoes in Oklahoma City, and all it takes is one. But that’s better than multiple population centers getting hit by storms the intensity of Monday’s storms.

Chasing Storms after the Concert

Bill, Kurt, and Tom are leaving tonight to chase Saturday’s setup out west. I’m staying behind to play with Francesca and Friends at the 2009 Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts. Ordinarily I’d feel a bit torn, but I have an idea that the better action will be on Sunday and–from the looks of the 12Z NAM-WRF–Monday. So when I step onto the stage tomorrow afternoon, unless between now and then a confluence between the NAM and GFS suggests that capping will suddenly no longer be an issue and Armageddon is going to break out in the Great Plains, I will be a man at peace.

But directly after the concert, I plan to pack my bags and head for the Corn Belt, where I’ll hook up with the guys and chase storms on Sunday and, if the present NAM-WRF comes at all close to verifying, Monday.

Frankly, I’m somewhat skeptical about Monday. Previous runs have consistently painted such a different scenario, with majorly veered surface winds and a unidirectional flow overall, that the 12Z’s placement of the weak surface low in eastern Iowa seems too good to be true.  Here’s an image from F5 Data showing sigtors, APRWX sigtor, surface wind barbs, and H5 wind speeds:

12Z NAM-WRF for 0Z Monday

12Z NAM-WRF for 0Z Monday (F5 Data)

Suddenly all the elements in terms of moisture, instability, and shear are lining up, along with a 7 sigtor in Iowa and even a 4 in southwest Michigan (in the usual lakeshore location, Berrien County). Makes me more than a little suspicious. But I think I can at least count on Sunday, and we’ll see whether future model runs continue to paint a rosier trend for Monday in Iowa and the Great Lakes.

So it’s play my saxophone on Saturday, then chase storms on Sunday and maybe Monday.  That’s about as nice an arrangement as I could possibly ask for–other than for this year to finally be the one where our act at the Festival doesn’t get interrupted by a hailstorm. That has happened three years in row. But I’ve got a good feeling that tomorrow is the day when we’ll finally make it through intact. That’ll be good. I’d just as soon save the hail for the day after.