2020Nov10pictures.html

November 10, 2020

Surely had been a long stretch since the last chase, so a slight risk situation did catch our eye. Typically, I don't even give this type of setup a second look. Line embedded supercells and bow echo rotation tend to require too much luck to be successful. But then I get a call from my son Ryan stating he'd like to chase. So, I gave in and by 8:30am, Ryan and I were on the road.

Ryan and I chose an initial target of far southeast Iowa, the Keokuk area. We consulted with Brian Stertz and he agreed. As we're driving north up Highway 61, we notice storms have already fired out to the west. As we got near the Iowa border, there was now a nearly solid line of storms from the Wisconsin Border all the way down to the middle of Missouri. There were a couple of cells in the long line of storms that were a bit more isolated because of a small break in the line that were coming at us from the southwest. We latched onto the strongest of these cells coming at us. The cell would surge, then weaken. Surge, then weaken. Had easterly winds for good veering as we were just northeast of the low, but instability was weak and the storm remained high based. We made it to just south of Mount Pleasant, Iowa before letting the cell cross in front of us and deciding following this cell was a losing battle.

Meanwhile, the very solid line to our southwest was severe warned all the way down to the middle of Missouri. We backtracked to Donnellson, Iowa and grabbed the road east to Fort Madison, Iowa to take the bridge over the Mississippi River to Illinois. As we entered Illinois, we stayed on the front edge of the severe warned line of storms as we worked our way east and south.

For the next few hours, occasionally the front edge of the line would catch us with the deluge of rain, the strong winds blowing dirt from the freshly plowed fields and the massive dumping of leaves off of the trees in the wooded areas.

We were always fortunate to have a road network to be able to move out in front of the line of storms again after being caught. We would line ourselves up with any notch or velocity reading we'd see in the line of storms as we continued working our way south and east. There was some very weak rotation on a couple occasions, but it would constantly be undercut by outflow. We did see a gustnado twirling a massive amount of leaves across the road, but unfortunately, too far in front of us for the dash camera to pick it up well. Also had one bout of pea size hail during our trip as well. We played on the leading edge for 3+ hours in Illinois and eventually ended up on the west side of Springfield, Illinois at dusk. We planned it so we'd have just enough time to grab some fast food before the squall line plowed through. We enjoyed the storm, now non-severe, as we let it overtake us as we ate our dinner in the car.

Below are some of the images from the afternoon line of storms in Illinois as we worked our way back toward home.