July 7th, 10th, and 11th Summaries

Hello everyone...

I apologize it's been a little while since I updated my status from Wednesday. The past couple of days have obviously been a little busy on the chase-front. No pun intended, of course...

I'll work on getting chase logs updated on here over the next couple of days. I still need to write up a more detailed summary from my chase on Monday (the 7th) and will have logs up from Thursday and Friday up, as well, this weekend.

In all, it's been an active week and now that I have a couple of days of down-time and no work, I should be able to get these things completed.

Stay tuned for the logs and photos!

July 1st, 2008 - Chase Summary

After a couple of days of forecasting and looking at models, I decided to head out chasing last evening.

A few co-workers and I met up at the office yesterday afternoon, looked at some last-minute data and after setting up the GPS, laptop, and topping off, we heading off for far Northwestern Minnesota.

A surface trough was progressing eastward across the state while a cold front was dropping southeast out of Canada setting up a decent shot at storms across the area. We didn't feel we needed to go far and initially targeted between Hallock and Roseau, MN. We didn't even end up that far north.

We shot east through town and jumped on MN-220 and progressed northward to MN-4 near Big Woods. Here, we jogged over to US-75 to head further north. We remained on US-75 through Donaldson, but pulled over on a county road a couple of miles north of town. We sat here for about an hour, watching towers attempting to develop to our north, but they consistently were being knocked over by mid and upper-level flow. Storms were developing to our north on the way up US-75, but the main cell had progressed well to our East and by the time we had stopped it had taken on a multi-cell look. Although, it did have some amazing structure to it. Updrafts kept back-building to the west, making for some dramatic scenes. We had a very nice perspective on it, but would have had to really bust east to catch up with it. It was increasingly moving into bad chasing terrain, as it was... Later, it had some especially nice structure with a very nice back-sheared anvil, updraft and overshooting top. Hopefully, the pictures will do it justice!

Anyhow, the towers along and behind the frontal boundary continued to get sheared apart and nothing ever really got going. We decided to reposition southward to remain ahead of the boundary and while doing so, noticed a minor cell trying to develop to our West. Mike and Jason decided to stop to take pictures of this, while Brad, Darren and I continued on south, then west, in attempt to get a better perspective. We stopped for a short photo op, then shot back down US-75 to Warren, then headed west on MN-1. We progressed westward only to watch our cell rain itself out and literally evaporate. Within a half-hour's time, the base on this thing was nearly gone. I hadn't seen anything like that in some time... It was pretty amazing.

We decided to continue west to I-29 to make our way back towards home. We stopped at the Manvel exit to get another look at additional updrafts trying to organize, but they, too, were getting sheared apart.

We quickly went into bag mode and returned back into Grand Forks at 7:44 PM. We met back up with Jason and Mike at Blue Moose for a drink and dinner, then parted our separate ways.

While the chase wasn't a complete bust, it certainly didn't pan out the way I was expecting. Models certainly didn't forecast the mid and upper-level flow last night very well. It had, at most 50-60 knot flow at 700 millibars and while there was decent speed shear in the upper 2-3 KM's, it shouldn't have sheared things apart the way it did out there in the field. It made it look as if we had a 80 knot jetlet over us, or something. Either way, the mid-level shear was just too great to allow updrafts to get organized further west, along the boundary. Storms to the east seemed to do better in possibly somewhat weaker flow and higher instabilities.

Another limiting factor for us last evening was my mobile data accessibility. For some reason or another I wasn't able to connect to the Internet via the Verizon Data Pack I signed up for and I was having issues with signal, to begin with. For the record, Northwestern Minnesota doesn't have great digital coverage through Verizon. I'll have to remember that! ;) The GPS worked quite well and for the first time, I strictly went off the Delorme Street Atlas and the GPS to navigate. It seemed to work very well and I'm continuing to think the GPS and SA upgrade was WELL worth the investment.

Now, I just need to figure out how to maintain my Internet connectivity. The GPS Real-Time Position Tracking through my web-site (yes, it is available now!) wasn't working either, because of the lack of an Internet connection, so that was another disappointment. Hopefully, in the near future, I'll have more chances to chase and test out the mobile setup.

I'll work on getting photos up tonight and tomorrow...
Stay tuned!

Total mileage: 130.4 miles
Time elapsed: 3 hours 38 minutes
Average moving speed:: 55.7 mph
Photo Gallery: http://photos.mhartman-wx.com/

June 26th, 2008 - Chase summary

The first real chase of 2008 up here in the Northern Plains is now in the books...

Our initial target area west of Bismarck turned out to be a good one. We departed Grand Forks around 11:30am and arrived in Bismarck near 3:00pm - exactly the 3.5 hour drive we expected. We spent a half-hour, maybe 45-minutes to top off the gas tank and grabbed a bite to eat at a local Schlotsky's Deli, then continued west to Glen Ullin. We turned north on SR-49 and sat off here about 2 miles north of I-94. We found a great vantage point to view west on top of a hill and observed two separate cells slowly move eastward toward us. The storms had already initiated over far southwestern ND and seemed to be maturing when we arrived at this location.

We had one cell to our west-southwest with the other west-northwest of us - probably between 30 to 40 miles. Both storms were exhibiting subtle lowerings in them and had a lot of scud underneath them. Each cell cycled through a couple of attempts at wall clouds before finally organizing into two very nice looking walls. Another cell to our north-northeast had also begun to develop by this time and, on radar, was also indicating weak rotation in the SRM product on GRLevel3.

The radar imagery was quite impressive as we had three distinct areas of rotation on radar all within a 30 mile radius of us. Granted the storms were far enough west of the radar that the rotation wasn't all that close to the cloud-bases. And that was likely the reason we hadn't heard any tornado warnings out for them. Visually, these things were quite beautiful to look at.

It was a general consensus today that these storms very likely didn't produce because of the lack of low-level flow. When we stopped north of Glen Ullin, we did not have any surface winds. It wasn't completely calm, but it may as well as been. Additionally, they were out of the south and not the southeast; what I had been hoping for.

Either way, after sitting in this location for about an hour and a half, we decided to get back on I-94, to head back East to get back out ahead of the storms and to possibly get in better position to intercept the storm to our northeast. This storm took off and was looking pretty meaty on GRLevel3. We made it East to near Sterling, then went north on SR-14 about a mile to pull off into a field entrance. We sat here to observe things for a while. Additional storms started developing along the pre-frontal trough, pretty much overhead and began to outrun us to the east-northeast. We tried to catch back up with this stuff by continuing north on 14 to Wing to meet up with SR-36. On our East turn here and progressing, we pretty much decided to bag the rest of the evening to head back to the "Forks." Our storms had merged with on-going convection to the north and seemed to be entering that MCS-o-genesis phase. We followed SR-36 east to US-281 near Pingree, then took this north to SR-57, where we cut across to Devils Lake. Here, we met up with US-2 to continue eastward to Grand Forks.

Lawson and Ahsenmacher played Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo-DS while Shaw and I chatted away and laughed how serious they were getting into their game. ;)

We arrived back in town around 11:55pm and after dropping Ahsenmacher, Lawson, and Shaw off at their cars at the office, I made my way back home.

Even with all the driving, I think it was well worth chasing that far west yesterday afternoon. It isn't often we can get a group of us together for chasing, so we took advantage of it. On top of that, it turned out to be a quite successful day for us. I feel we pretty much saw the best we could have today, without driving any further south. We had two very nice storms with nice wall clouds and did see hail in the form of "hail-shafts." Luckily, we were able to avoid being any part of one.

The GPS setup got a pretty good test run, as well today. It seems the Position Tracking turned out fairly well. It seems there are a couple of fixes to make but I've done these already, so hopefully in future chases, it will work better for everyone. The GRLevel3 application seems to have been a wise investment, as well. It turned invaluable when we were on the road and when observing storms near Glen Ullin.

I have a feeling I'm going to get spoiled with this data and GPS setup...

I'll have photos up at some point this weekend...

Total Mileage: 642.9 miles
Time elapsed: 11 hours 28 minutes
Photo Gallery: http://photos.mhartman-wx.com/

chase log completed!

Hi folks,

The chase log and photos from yesterday's chase expedition are now uploaded and ready for your viewing pleasure. I apologize for the poor quality of the photos, but stupid me forgot to check that the battery was in the XT before leaving town. I didn't notice until I was well past the Grand Forks Air-Force Base... Oops!

Anyhow, they both can now be accessed from my web-site.

Enjoy!