Father's Day tornado...

I'm no father, but it was still great to receive a present yesterday! Justin Turcotte, Lu Zhang (a friend of mine), and I departed the city yesterday around 3:30 pm with an initial target around Finley, ND. On our way south on I-29 we found a building tower to our southeast and kept watching this thing literally explode out of nothing in about 15 minutes to a very nice thunderhead. It was very appealing to the eye, so we took the Thompson exit to pull off and take pictures when Justin's wife called to tell us that a Tornado Warning had been issued for Central Polk County (Minnesota). It caught us by surprise, since the storm went up so fast and that, to us, appeared to have developed north of the warm front.*

We drifted south a bit to County Road 7, where we turned east to approach the storm from the west. We drove a few miles down County Road 9 (in Minnesota now) before stopping to view the tightening mesocyclone. It was still rather small and was looking a little ragged. Further down the road another 3 miles or so, we pulled off after seeing what we thought was a needle funnel. It developed into a nice rope and stretched laterally, then curved downward and finally touched down. We were approximately 3-4 miles from where it came down, so we couldn't confirm if it was actually on the ground or not, but reports told us otherwise. I was fiddling around with the HT trying to get into the Grand Forks Skywarn-Net to report and by the time Turcotte got his camera out and fired up, the tornado had dissipated. So, unfortunately, neither of us were able to get any photos of the actual funnel or tornado. The whole event (from the first funnel sighting to touchdown and dissipation lasted about 40 seconds to maybe a minute). It was very quick... Luckily, however there was a chaser that was able to grab several pictures. The photo below is credited to him (Beau Gjerdingen). His other pictures can be found in his Picasa web gallery.

Within 10-15 minutes after the dissipation of the tornado, our meso had all but fallen apart and the parent storm, itself looked very glaciated... The updraft didn't look impressive at all anymore. So, after reaching Highway 75, we decided to drive south to Nielsville to cross back over into ND and head towards our original target. We arrived in Mayville on Hwy 200 around 5:15 and futzed around the area for about a half-hour. Justin wanted to check out the old ghost town (settlement maybe?) of Roseville (south-southwest of Mayville) and since we were far from initiation time, we drove on down through Clifford and Galesburg to check them out, as well. Nice small towns with hardly anything! ;)

We were finding some higher terrain since we were practically on the edge of the valley, so we drove west out of Galesburg and parked at the top of a hill. We had a very nice vantage to our south and west. We sat here for a couple of hours, but nothing wanted to cooperate. The capping inversion held up and even though we finally saw some moisture convergence and subsequent clouds, nothing had any vertical extent to it. Not until we began our trek back northward on Hwy 38, and later on Hwy 32 did we begin to see towers developing to our northwest. I had decided to download the AccuWeather Premium demo on my Verizon phone and it was sufficient for getting radar/satellite updates - and we had noticed storms developing up in the Devils Lake basin. We heading in that direction. We traversed the warm front once again, north of Hope, ND on 32 and at that point, we ran into a lot of low-level moisture and fog (with visibilities down to 3/4 of a mile for a short stretch). This limited our visibilities of the storms to our northwest. Once we reached Petersburg on US-2, we gave the radar another look, but decided to call it an evening and headed back to Grand Forks. We got back to the office at 10:10 pm, where I took Lu back home and retreated to my apartment.

Photos will be forthcoming and, possibly a more complete log will be, as well.

Overall, it was an exciting chase, especially seeing my first tornado since April 20, 2004. It was frustrating not getting any video or photos of it, but either way, I know what I saw and that's enough.

* Upon analysis this afternoon, it appears that either the warm front surged north or some pre-existing boundary surged north and kicked off initiation. I'll have a radar loop posted later for all to see what I'm referring to.