Category: Storm Chase

The morning of this day I was planning on heading to Iowa to chase, as I originally thought the best tornado chances would be near the surface low. Eventually, I decided it was too far to drive during the work week, and decided to stick closer to home. As the day went on, I grew…

My first storm chase of 2017. Turned out to be a pretty interesting day. It was the farther north tornadoes have ever been reported in February in Illinois, and had the strongest tornadoes ever reported in February in the Chicago NWS’s county warning area. I stayed at work a little late that day, thinking I…

I had been watching this day for about a week, ever since I saw northwest flow setting up over Illinois in the forecast models. Northwest flow gives us a lot of our severe weather. So, the day of the event, I had work during the morning. After I got off work, I stopped by my…

This was my first storm chase of 2016. I had been watching this event since the week before, and I thought it looked like a pretty good set up. Unlike my last two storm chases in 2015, there was an abundance of instability, as well as a lot of wind shear. The main concerns of…

December 23rd was another one of those days where I do just about everything right, but mother nature doesn’t cooperate. I had been watching this event since about before it happened. I recognized that the areas to the south were more likely to get tornadoes, but there was also a chance for some in western…

November storm chases are always interesting. This was the third time that I’ve gone chasing in November, last time being the day of the Washington, IL tornado. Of course, that day was on my mind as I forecasted this event, though it didn’t look like it would be anywhere near as bad as the Washington…

Abbi, Adam, and I left Dekalb and went to Rochelle first. From there, we went north for a while, before turning around and heading to Dixon. We stopped briefly at a Taco Bell on the north side of Dixon. While there, we stopped two cells merging out ahead of the mess that was the Davenport…

This was an interesting day, as two waves of severe storms moved through northern Illinois. I left my house in the morning and headed towards Iowa. While there had been some discreet supercells, by the time I got to the Iowa City area the storms had consolidated into a QLCS. I found a nice, open…

This was a disappointing day for sure. After touring around Nebraska for a bit, I ended up in Ord. Sat there for a while, waiting for storms to develop. There was some convection to my north, but it was very disorganized looking. To my southwest, some new convection began firing up, near where the SPC…

This chase was a kind of a spur of the moment thing. Earlier in the day, the SPC had 5% tornado probability right overhead. That eventually got downgraded to 2%. But during the late afternoon/early evening there were some strong storms moving into northern Illinois. One storm in particular, heading towards Dekalb, was looking supercellular;…