It appears that the chase potential today has become rather dull... The models had progressively diminished chances for storms today over the past couple of days and with the MCS that pushed southeast across SErn ND, NErn SD, and Central and Southern Minnesota this morning, I think it pretty much zapped the better forcing and moisture much further south.
There's still some decent moisture convergence out there (DMC, for you Doswell groupies... hah!) and the instability is there for possibly some random showers and thunderstorms to bubble up to the east. I've been watching the radar scope and other than a few weak echoes, nothing has really taken off, other than up near Lake of the Woods, where there was a valid SVR earlier.
I'm holding out hope for this weekend. Saturday, another decent shortwave pushes across the region and that may bring another potential chase day. I'll continue to monitor that situation and will update the ol' blog here to let you all know the plan of attack.
More later...
Thursday is looking like a potential chase day around the area. Since I'm on a fairly short leash regarding money and mileage on my car with my up-coming vacation, this seems to shaping up quite well.
Granted this is a few days out yet, but the 00z NAM and GFS, as well as the 06z NAM are staying rather consistent. The 06zNAM is indicating plenty of shear (200+ helicities over much of Ern ND) and instability (EHI's of 2+ over SErn ND) for big storms. Flow is respectable with a nice 70-90 KT westerly jetlet at 500mb above southeasterly flow at the surface. The resultant hodographs are simply amazing with all kinds of curvature and storm-relative inflow...
It's something I'm certainly going to be keeping an eye on. If things remain consistent, I may just take the opportunity to finally make it out again. After an active two weeks at the beginning of the month, we've fell back into a lull the two weeks since. Yesterday's setup was very marginal and things pretty much happened the way I figured it would - not firing up until after dark, at least in and around the Nrn Valley area.
Let's hope Thursday pans out!
Stay tuned...
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!
We may be looking at another opportunity to chase tomorrow. Looking at the latest models, much of central and eastern North Dakota may just be looking at a decent threat for Supercells and tornadoes. Low-level and deep-layer shear and instability look outstanding and our mid and upper-level flow is more than enough to support Supercells.
I haven't seen hodographs like these in quite some time, so I feel I need to share these... This image is a forecast sounding near Grand Forks, ND at 3Z Friday (10:00pm Thursday evening). The hodograph in the upper-right hand corner is one of the largest I've seen in quite a while. That is some outstanding storm-relative inflow!
Capping won't be as much of an issue as with our chase days over the past week and if the trends continue on the NAM, convection may fire late in the afternoon and that would certainly help my cause. Since I'm on mids this week, I'll have Thursday open, but I'll have to be back into town by 11:30pm Thursday night for work.
It doesn't look like I'd need to drive far and that will help, as well.
This definitely looks like one of the better setups we've had around these parts in some time.
I'll continue to watch things over the next day or so and will try to update the blog here.
More later...
The storm coverage surprised me a bit today... and wasn't anticipating a chase really. When I saw the storm to the south of town earlier this afternoon, I took off after it. Unfortunately, the storm weakened a bit and dove southeast.
I decided to stay on it, hoping it would recycle some, ignoring TOR warned stuff to my north. That activity looked more linear and didn't look like it was in as good of an environment. Lo and behold, the southern storm back-built to the west and went SVR warned again. I got far enough south to position myself in front of it. It wasn't a whole lot to look it, but it was still pretty.
I retreated back north after letting this storm pass to my north and east, in attempt to catch up with the newly TOR'ed stuff to the north but they really crapped out.
So, I'm sitting here in Crookston to get a little data and to watch the archived radar stuff. Boy, that stuff to the north really petered out! I probably wouldn't have caught up with it anyway...
Anyhow, I'll have a more detailed log up later tonight. I'm continuing on home...
It's looking like my plans for my extended time off this weekend from work will be changing somewhat. I was initially thinking of taking a road trip out west to finally see the badlands here in North Dakota.
It's looking now, that while I'll still be heading west on Saturday, it will be to see Supercells! This afternoon's 12z NAM is indicating a fairly significant surface trough pushing eastward across the Northern Plains. Steepening lapse rates and good flow in the mid to upper-levels should give us plenty of instability and shear for Supercells. I'm a little concerned with the mid-level temperatures. With 700mb temps from 10 to 15° C, it will be fairly capped out there. The NAM is convecting things over western/central ND between 21 and 00z, which I think is being quite liberal. I wouldn't be surprised if things hold off closer to sunset. It does show some slight weakening in the inversion along and just behind the frontal boundary, so maybe ascent will be strong enough to provide that trigger to bust through it.
It's a couple of days out yet, but it will be something I'll keep close tabs on over the next 24-36 hours.
I'm definitely enjoying this pattern...
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/
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/
Well, as written previously, today (Thursday) looks to be a fairly active severe weather day across the Northern Plains. As such, a few co-workers and I will be out chasing this afternoon and into this evening.
We are initially targeting somewhere west, perhaps southwest, of Bismarck. We plan on departing GFK by 11:00am to make it out there by 3:00 or 4:00pm.
I'll have data available and as such, will be able to sync the GPS with a new tracking function on the web-site. If anyone out there is curious and wants to track where we are, you can now get it on my web-site:
http://www.mhartman-wx.com/mwx_gps.html
Enjoy the new function and if you see any glitches, please let me know!
Wish us luck!
Looks like this week may be the first real opportunity to get out chasing across the state. Tomorrow could be active across the western part of the state with Thursday looking like another active severe weather day.
I'll be monitoring things closely tonight and may decide to head out west tomorrow to check things out. Depends on dynamite of a setup it turns into overnight tonight on the models and how much sleep I want tomorrow. Otherwise, I may just wait it out until Thursday's event.
Stay tuned...
Good evening everyone...
Thought I would share some news with everyone. I've been working on the web-site the past couple of nights and can officially announce that I am now offering semi-live radar feeds on my site.
The radar feed comes from GRLevel3, a radar visualization application currently running on my laptop from home. While the radar will not always be current, it will update every six minutes when I have the application running. Please note, also, that it will not always be centered at a set location. Radar sites will likely change fairly frequently, giving you an idea of areas where I may be monitoring weather features. This will generally be where severe weather will be occurring. As such, I'm referring to it as a Radar Imagery Floater. Featured among the radar imagery will be Base Reflectivity and Storm-Relative Velocity on a half-degree volume scan, as well as VIL (Vertically Integrated Liquid) data.
In addition, information regarding storm attributes, storm-tracks, storm reports, chaser/spotter locations, and surface observations will occasionally show up on the radar images.
I have also uploaded over 100 new photos to my Photo Gallery. These include pictures from a bowing segment from July 22, 2007 here in Grand Forks, ND, photos from Northwood, ND when Justin, Mike and I stopped through on our way back from the Northern Plains Convective Workshop in early April, and all my photos from my Chase Vacation that extended from May 24th through June 1st.
Enjoy looking through the photos and if you have any questions regarding the new radar imagery or photos, please feel free to shoot me an E-mail.
Sorry, this is coming so much after the fact...
We woke in Independence, Kansas Saturday morning thinking we wouldn't have much traveling to do. I had decided to park my car at Ed Robert's place in KC the night before, so in doing that, I pretty much committed myself to chasing on Saturday.
We chased north-central and north-eastern Oklahoma Saturday and it pretty much turned out similar to Friday. Storms along the trailing boundary didn't quite develop, as planned during the afternoon, but did finally pop near the OK/KS border near Osage County, where the outflow boundary had intersected the frontal boundary. We decided to play that and took off east-northeast towards the storms. The NWS quickly went SVR on the storms and while stopped for gas near Tonkawa, a TOR came out for the eastern storm that had developed. We busted east on US-60, trying to catch up, but never did quite reach it. The western storm also went tornadic and when we caught up with that, we had to drop south on OK-18 so that we wouldn't drive into the precip core. This took us in and out of hills, trees, and curves. This part of northeastern Oklahoma will certainly go down as one of them spots never to return to chase, that's for sure. Horrible chase territory!
Anyhow, we still were able to observe the storms from afar and while we never did see any tornadoes from these storms, we did see a few wall clouds and a nice mothership look to the eastern storm for a short time.
We followed the storms eastward and at Skiatook (or what Jared liked to refer to as "Skankytown"), we took 75 north, effectively bagging the rest of the evening for our return to Kansas City. Along the way, we were treated to quite a lightning show from the storms to our north and east. We pulled off for a short time to get some photos, but other than that, it turned into a long drive back north.
I picked up my car at Ed's around 1:00am and we pulled into our hotel in Merriam, KS by 2:00.
I awoke with the guys a little late, but anticipating leaving when they did Sunday morning. We all got on the road around 9:00am. Jared, Gregg, and John planned on playing the Nebraska panhandle, if they could make it out there in time and I made my way back up I-29 through Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and into Grand Forks.
I pulled onto 32nd Avenue right at 7:01pm, so my drive was almost exactly the 10-hour drive I had expected. I noted 9:15am as my departure from KC Sunday morning.
I unpacked the luggage, put things away, and went for dinner. All I had eaten all day was two packs of SweetTarts and a Tropicana Twister to drink. ;)
The trip, in all, was a blast and I'm anxious to go again next year.
Here are a few notable stats of my own, if you're curious...
Total mileage: 2,649 miles
Total gas used: 110.049
Avg. Miles/Gal: 24.071 (not bad!)
Tornadoes: 2 (the first is highly debatable)
Reports: 1 (TOR - 8 S of Elm Creek, KS)
No. of Photos: 293 (will be forthcoming...)
What was initially planned as a relocation day turned into a nice surprise. We left Norman Wednesday morning, shooting for Hays to pick up my car, then to continue on to McCook, NE - where we were going to stay for the night. We expected a chase day for Thursday, so we wanted to find a spot somewhere near the NW-KS/SW-NE border for the best logistics.
We made it to Hays with no problems, and while, we continued monitoring the situation in Colorado through the afternoon. Upslope action looked to be fairly marginal and initially we thought of blowing it off for the McCook destination. While in Hays, however, we decided to shoot for storms that had begun developing off the mountains in eastern and northeastern CO. We made our way westward along I-70, eventually making it near Kit Carson, where we dropped south to observe a rather nice cell there. The storm showed a decent couplet on GrLevel3 in the velocity data, so we busted through the edge of the precip core from the north, to get to the southeast quadrant and made it in time to watch the lowered cloud base to our west move to our north and east. The wall cloud did get its act together somewhat and did exhibit rotation, but it didn't quite drop anything. There were very brief funnel "attempts," but nothing materialized. It seemed that the high LFC's today really hurt our chances at seeing a tornado. And it also didn't seem that the storm, itself, had a very pronounced RFD to help wrap up the low-level mesocyclone.
Either way, we watched the storm move off to our east-northeast into more stable air as it rained itself out.
We're sitting here in Colby, KS tonight and we're getting rather excited about tomorrow's potential. It's looking like it may turn into one of the better setups we've had this week and with a Day 1 outlook that includes a 15% hatched in it's tornado probabilities, it's got both Jared and myself rather anxious for what could be in store. It's looking like central Nebraska, perhaps, far north-central Kansas will be the place to be. Should be fun!
More later...
I apologize I didn't get around to writing anything last evening. We didn't get into Norman until late and we were all tired. Yesterday (Monday), we targeted primarily southwestern Kansas, ironically enough, around the Greensburg area.
We drove into Greensburg to see the rebuilding effort there and ran into a mass convergence of chasers at the local gas station. It wasn't particularly a fun experience with 50 chasers there. But, it was still nice to meet some locals and I was able to purchase a book that some of the locals had put together about their experiences with the EF-5 tornado last spring. I haven't started reading it yet, but it will probably be an interesting read.
Anyhow, we ended up sitting outside of Greensburg, watching developing towers to our south and southwest. By around mid-afternoon, we had storms developing to the southwest and after relocating slightly north of Haviland, a nice Supercell went tornado-warned to the southwest of Greensburg. We tracked this storm eastward towards Pratt, but never did see any tornadic development. The storm certainly tried though. This thing had tremendous inflow from the east and southeast and had a very robust inflow band. It was just incredible. We eventually made it to 160 and we ended up sitting off here at a couple of spots just watching this thing attempting to get it's act together. It never did and other storms developing all around seemed to become outflow-dominate rather quickly. We weren't quite sure why, but it seemed that none of the storms could maintain their inflow/outflow balance all afternoon. We eventually called it an evening after this cell collapsed and moved off to the east toward Kingman. We continued eastward on 160 to 281 to return to 54/400, then progressed eastward towards Wichita. We stopped near Kingman to watch a cell that had become tornado-warned, but it really didn't amount to much either. After that, we continued through Wichita, then making it back to Norman to spend the night.
Today (Tuesday), we took off towards southwest Oklahoma and far northwestern Texas. It seemed pretty much the same story today. We all thought storms would develop along the cold front from near Childress, TX upward through Woodward, OK, with other storms developing near the Cold Front/OFB intersection. With the latter, we were hoping would become the storms of the day. It didn't necessarily turn out that way, as storms again seemed to fire off earlier than expected.
They continued that outflow/inflow imbalance again today, as well, and none of the storms did really look all that impressive. Storms around the Altus area seemed to build into a rather significant Supercell, with several reports of hail coming out of the cell that eventually came together. It went through a transition of mergers before becoming the initial dominate cell. We had decided to drop southward to play storms developing ahead of the cold front, hoping that interaction with the OFB would give them that extra "umph" we needed for tornadic cells. It didn't seem to work, much as the past couple of days have been. We played around with storms in the Chillicothe and Quanah, TX area, across the Red River, but eventually moved back north into Oklahoma to follow storms to near Eldorado, OK. As these storms fizzled, we retreated back south to Quanah, where we actually intercepted a newly formed Supercell north of town. We sat very near and actually, under, an appendage associated with this storm, but never did see much in the way of rotation. Slight, if any, in fact. The problem, we were getting strong northwest outflow from storms to our northeast and this seemed to undercut the storm we were on. Velocity data on GrLevel3 indicated outbound winds through the entire area. It was still cool though to know we were that close to an elevated mesocyclone! Mid-level rotation did exist on the limited radar data we were getting.
After this, we drifted back east through Vernon and eventually took 183 northeast out of Oklaunian. We took this back to 62 East, progressing back towards Lawton. Upon entering Lawton, Gallina had noticed a strange lenticular cloud developing to our south and with the setting sun and the mammatus overhead, we decided to pull over to take some video and photos. We sat in Lawton for about a half-hour doing this, before continuing on our way to Norman. We pulled into town around 11:00 pm and arrived back here to Guyer's place around 11:30 after dropping Massura off at his house and to grab a bite to eat.
Tomorrow, we're planning to use, primarily, as a relocation day and don't foresee any chasing whatsoever. Unless anything drastic changes, we're planning on getting to, at least, Hays to pick up my car and to possibly stay the night. If not, we'll continue through to Cheyenne, WY to setup for chase potential Thursday over the high country of WY and possibly, western SD or northeastern CO. We'll have to see where we end up. Either way, we'll probably end up back in Kansas Thursday evening, so I'll be able to drive it off of the parking lot, finally, then.
I sure hope it'll still be there and that it hasn't been tampered with, whatsoever. I tend to be trusting of people, so let's hope that doesn't change.
More later!
Don't read too much into that exclamation point... ;)
I made it eventually on the road by 7am, like I planned this morning and didn't end up meeting up with Jared, John and Gregg until 4:00pm in Aurora, NE. While we targeted the dryline setting up across eastern Nebraska, things didn't seem to phase correctly today and it seemed that we just didn't have that extra "umph" with surface-based buoyancy or mass convergence to get updrafts to withstand the deep-layer shear we had today. Plenty of towers went up today, but they just couldn't get their act together.
Ironically, the storms of the day were in Oklahoma (where John, Jared, and Gregg were traveling from) and in North and South Dakota (where, obviously, I was traveling from).
To make a long story, short, I only took two photos today with the camera and didn't even take the video camera out. It was that bad.
We're sitting in Omaha for the night and will likely make a decision in the morning to aim for the severe threat over central IA and southeastern MN during the afternoon.
Hopefully, we'll have some better luck.
Hello folks,
I'm cross-posting this from my personal blog...
Beginning early tomorrow morning, I will be out of town tending to my chase vacation with some former colleagues of mine. I plan on being on the road by 7:00am and will be driving southward towards Sioux Falls. From there, we will either target southeastern South Dakota or eastern portions of Nebraska.
My expeditions will continue through through May 31st, with my return coming either during the late evening of the 31st or early on June 1st.
So as long as I have a signal, I'll still be available via cell phone. So, if you need to reach me, just give me a jingle. My number can be found by navigating through the "Contact Me" tab above.
If you are curious as to our whereabouts, you may take a gander at Jared's tracking application at his web-site. As long as he has his GPS and web-cam in operation this page should update every 10 to 15 minutes. Obviously, we can't guarantee this will be operable the entire time we're on the road, but hopefully, we'll be able to update our position sporadically through the week.
Be prepared for photos, as I'm sure I'll have lots to share upon my return...
Have a great week, all!
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.
We've been watching today for the last few days via the GFS and NAM, and it appears that there is still a good chance for storms this afternoon and into this evening across much of eastern North Dakota. With the weekend off, my chase status is pretty much a go. I've come into the office to look at things a little more closely and Turcotte will be joining me shortly. We've decided to rendezvous here to straighten out logistics for the afternoon.
I'm still leaning on my initial target area; around the Cooperstown area. Any area from Cooperstown, to Valley City, to Crookston (MN), to Detroit Lakes (MN) looks good, though - particularly over the western and northern portion of that area. The warm front is hanging up in that region right now and I'm not sure how much further north it's going to surge. If it can hang around there, backing winds along the boundary will result in a much greater sheared environment for rotating storms.
Impressive to see LI's at -12 and lower and CAPE values nearing 7000 (wow!) near the Jamestown and Valley City area towards 00z on the 18z RUC. I'm not quite buying into that, but it's still impressive!
Will likely be taking off here within the next hour or two.
Didn't end up seeing much this afternoon and evening, but here's a short summary of my brief Memorial Day chase:
Was on the road around 4:30 PM, and arrived at my initial target of Larimore around 5:25... Sat at this location for about a half-hour watching things. Large updraft to my north blew up, so I took off after it, but wasn't gaining any ground. It raced off to my northeast and became the Pembina County (ND) / Kittson County (MN) beast... Bases were fairly elevated on the CU field above me and nothing was happening to my west, but did finally get a visual on building towers to my west-northwest a little after 6:00 PM as I continue northward on Highway 18. Gave my buddy, Jared Guyer, a call and he stated that a location around Pisek would be good, so continued north on Highway 18 and sat at a location about 1 mile east of the 18 / CR-15 junction. An updraft had developed into a decent cell to my west-southwest and to get into better position and after another short consultation with Guyer, decided to head towards Park River. The storm dissipated and I let it pretty much rain itself out as it passed over my location 2 miles north of Park River around 7:10 PM. Afterward, I continued north on CR-12 to CR-9 East, then proceeded back to 18. Here, I turned south in attempt to stay east of the frontal boundary... Stopped at the junction of 18 and CR-19 to again monitor the boundary to my west. A few towers attempted to go up, but were really struggling to stay together. Bases were still fairly elevated at this point, so I pretty much called it a night and began the trek back towards Grand Forks. A few scattered showers had developed in eastern Nelson and western Grand Forks counties by the time I had made it back to Highway 2, but with my daylight diminishing fast, I followed my initial plans to head back home.
All in all, not bad of a chase, since I did see a couple storms. The cell to my north was pretty much the storm of the day and I had to ditch it since it took off so fast to the northeast. I'm not sure why the thing took off like it did, with the remaining convection this evening remaining right along the boundary and not budging their way eastward very fast at all... Boundary layer conditions today were fairly critical and I had noticed just before leaving work that dewpoints in both Fargo and here in Grand Forks had actually dropped 2-4 degrees between 3:00 and 4:00 pm. And with the clearer skies over the valley and the extensive CU-field to the west, it was pretty clear that the surface low was wrapping in dryer air from the southwest. So, I'm sure that had some sort of effect on our BL conditions today. I think on top of that, our capping inversion held up a little bit stronger than what the models had been indicating earlier in the day. I guess if I had to have done anything different, I would have drove straight north out of town on departure. I dismissed the greater effective shear to the north since very little instability was up there. The area where the Pembina storm initiated in was under cloud-cover almost all day... Either it destabilized pretty quickly once those clouds started decreasing, or some other sort of trigger came along and sparked those updrafts up there. Either way, it was much easier for the updrafts to get rooted in the BL in that area...
One of these days, I'll make one of these chases worth the time spent!
A more complete log and a few select photos will be posted tomorrow, when I get more time...
A big thanks goes out to Jared Guyer and Bryan McQuade for providing some nowcasting support for me today... It was a big help!
It's looking like today may turn into another chase opportunity for us here in the Northern Plains. We're sitting under a fairly extensive cloud deck this morning over much of eastern North Dakota, however we should see some clearing this afternoon and with us getting into the warm sector of the shortwave pushing east-northeast through the region today, we should get into some decent instability. The 06z NAM and GEM are a bit quicker and start convecting around 21z over eastern areas of North Dakota and then progressively initiate thunderstorms along the inverted trough axis and cold front this evening. The NAM still seems a bit high on it's moisture return this afternoon, with surface dewpoints increasing into the mid 60's across the area by this afternoon. I'm a little concerned with that, given that our dewpoints this morning are only in the lower 40's across the northern valley. They are increasing over the southern portions of the valley down by Fargo (they've gone from 38° to 52° in the last 2 hours) and especially near Wahpeton (from 53° to 61° over the same period) where they're getting sun already.
The quicker we lose these clouds, the better chance for our daytime heating and moisture return. LI's range from -2 to -8 across the region and with EHI's at 3+, it seems that we have a decent balance of instability and shear. Could very well have some supercells out there this afternoon. Looks like east-central parts will be prime by later this afternoon and if I do head out, I'm thinking of heading in that direction.
More later...