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6:30 a.m. or so looking at the sunrise with exiting morning storm to the left. An elevated hailer almost got Blair. One hour after it went by I drove through the area it passed and there were still piles of small hail. |
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Well I left home around 7:30 and turned the xm on around 8 and started chasing! There was a rather nice cell moving nne out of nw MO so I tried to intercept it since it could be on my way to southern IA. It was a little booger to chase coming from the nw of it. As I'd get a bit further south I'd realize I'd have to move east more and after zig zagging for a good part of the early morning I got in position to catch it as it crapped out. Then a new one would start to form and now they were all cycling too fast to really try to intercept them from any distance. That first one though looked nice for quite a while. Here is one that hailed on me south of Des Moines a little before noon. Rather high small bases but this had a bit of a rfd/gust front and looked like it was attempting to wrap up. I knew not to expect much appearance wise. |
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Same storm moving nne at a good clip. |
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In this band/arm the conection would keep refiring on the south side of it letting them crap out as they got north and then do it again. I finally got south of it se of Des Moines just before noon one county into IA from MO. It was just nice to see convection again. |
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Like everything else at this point you could count on them weakening quickly. |
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Sheared apart and dying.
South of this boundary the winds were currently quite strong and from the due south with readings of like 72/50. There was also a lot of tcu. I had thought this was the main dry push but then began to wonder looking at the tcu and sfc obs. I waited here for around an hour before giving up and heading n back to the boundary with convection on it. |
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Trying to chase the impossible storm speeds now. I chased one storm from se of Des Moines to near Ceder Rapids. |
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A rather depressing chase day ends. At least I got to see how nice xm worked. It quickly showed just how it can only do so much for you. There were better looking storms in IL but by that time I had no chance of making them. It is funny my pick the day before on st.org was Ft. Dodge to Des Moines and there ended up being 3 tor reports just se of Ft. Dodge. That sucks. Anyway, xm was wonderful and it ran ALL day with no problems(from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m.). Other notes from 560 miles of driving around in IA: Radio stations suck in Iowa. I swear it is either talk radio, gospel stuff, or country....that is mostly all and there are usually several of each of those. Many more cds are in order for the next chase in IA. The town of Grinnel IA is to be avoided at all costs from here on out. Can you put any more badly timed stop lights in one city? That and for its size it is crowded! A billion people all waiting for a billion stop lights.....and....I don't remember a single left turn arrow on any of them yet everyone wanted to turn left. I had to stop at every single one of them from coming in from the east and leaving south, many I had to wait for more then one turn of the lights. I should of timed how long it took to get through. |
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