August 20, 2022  

It has been a long summer with no tornado opportunities within driving range of the house, so when we finally woke up on a Saturday and had a marginal risk in Central Illinois with the mention of the word tornado, it piqued our interest.  My son Ryan and I made the decision to travel up to that area with the idea that we would do a wildlife trip, but if the situation presented itself with the possibility of storms, we'd have an easy transition.

We left in the mid-morning and worked our way up toward Springfield, Illinois.  Took a side trip to a State Park near Springfield and did some wildlife photography.  As we were leaving the Park, we noticed on radar a few storms had developed to our Northwest.  We were also glad to note that the Storm Prediction Center had upgraded the threat to a slight risk.

We set our target now to our northwest to intercept a couple cells moving toward Peoria, Illinois.


We approached the cells as they came through Peoria.  The northern cell became the dominant cell as we followed it northeastward.  It became severe warned, but there were many other cells that were now firing disrupting further development, so we let that cell go and worked our way back west on the the southern end of the storms.

We were surprised when as we approached the last cell in the group of cells that it began showing some explosive development with rotation.



We work our way northward on the east side of Morton, Illinois.  As we made a turn to move eastward through the country roads, Ryan looks back at the storm and shouts "Tornado".  We quickly parked the car, jumped out, and got the video camera running.




Wa a





The storm made several attempts at condensing out into a full tube, but just could not sustain the funnel.  There were trees preventing us from truly confirming a ground touchdown, but from our view, a couple of the stronger spinups appeared to easily have the ability to reach the ground. 
We placed a call to the Weather Service and a few minutes later, a tornado warning was issued. 

We continued to follow the storm eastward and it made other attempts at spinning up a tornado with hard rotation above the ground, but we never saw any funnel touch the ground.




We followed the storm further and it continued to show its wall cloud, but it could never regain the rotation seen in the early part of the storm development.




As it became obvious that storms in our area were no longer a tornado threat, we grabbed a quick late lunch and set our sights on beginning to work our way back south toward home.  We continued to watch more storms moving in from the west, watched the storms still to our north, and were looking at distant storms to the east and south.  We were even treated to a bright rainbow in the the evening before the colorful sunset with the billowing storm clouds.










Our Entire Trip
 Detailed Area of the Chase

I contacted the Lincoln, Illinois National Weather Service and shared our video with them.  They stated they've received no reports so far of any damage from the funnel cloud to the north of Morton, Illinois and since the video was inconclusive for ground contact, there is no survey scheduled.

12 Hours  -  460 Miles


Click on the link below to see video of some of these storms.