This
certainly seems like the year for making the "morning
of" decision to chase. After speaking with my son
Ryan, talking over the situation with our friend Brian
Stertz, and figuring out the last minute details, the
decision was made to chase the set-up. There were
two targets that were sticking out at us. A target
up in Southeast Iowa that the weather models seemed to
fire early evening and the second target out in Eastern
Kansas/Western Missouri that would fire in the late
afternoon. We left around noon and chose the
western target as the one we would go after.
After I picked up Ryan,
we got on westbound I-70 with a target of somewhere near
Kansas City. As we got to Warrenton, Missouri,
without much warning, the highway came to a complete
stop. We sat and sat not moving at all. 30
minutes later, we were still in the same spot. To
make matters worse, we saw on radar that storms were
firing up on the Kansas/Missouri Border a lot earlier
than they were predicted to fire. Finally, the
traffic began moving again, but by that time, it was
becoming obvious we would be trailing those storms that
would be heading for the hills and trees of the
Ozarks. The decision was made not continue with
the western target and now would reroute to the northern
target. We got off the Interstate on the next exit
and began working our way northward on some of the
backroads to work our way up to Highway 61 northward.
After a brief stop in New
London for a business phone call and Hannibal for a late
lunch, we made a bee-line for Iowa. We began
hearing of the tornado touchdowns near Des Moines,
Iowa. Nothing was happening in our target area of
southeast Iowa, so we continued north and finally made
the decision to head west to intercept those storm that
were coming southeast from Des Moines. We made our
way north to Mount Pleasant, Iowa and the west to
Fairfield, Iowa as we could now see the approaching
storms.
From
Fairfield we were in range for the intercept of the
storms closing in on us. We dropped south out of
Fairfield and watched as the storms approach. As
we watched the tornado warned storm right in front of us
now, there were multiple spin-ups on the front of the
line. At one point, we could see some
condensation being pulled up under a circulation from
the ground level into the storm.
We
continued to play tag with this tornadic storm and a
couple other severe warned cells staying just in front
of them from this point all the way down into
Missouri. a couple of places, the edge of the
storm would grab us due to the road network and we'd
find ourselves in under the front of the precipitation,
but we never did see any funnels or tornadoes in the
large, high precipation supercells that were stalking
us. We finally ended our chase as the sun was
setting under the edge of another approaching severe
warned supercell. Then when we finally hit Highway
61 south to head back home, the front of the lead cell
had caught up with us and we battled driving back south
in the heavy rain on the bow echo of the storm until we
finally broke free about half way home.
The
Severe Storms Prediction Center officially listed no
tornadoes from the point that we intercepted the storm
until the end of our chase. The storm complex followed
us all the way back to St. Louis, Missouri and passed
just to the east of the metro area.
July 19, 2018 
