June 24, 2023  

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A late season opportunity with the potential of Tornadic Supercells brought my son Ryan and I out to Lenexa, Kansas to pick up our chase partner Brian.  Our target was in west central Iowa.  The Storm Prediction Center issued a slight risk with a 5% Tornado risk.




We left in the early morning and headed for our target city of Creston, Iowa.  As we drove, our target moved up to I-80 to Atlantic, Iowa based on new data that we were seeing.  We grabbed lunch at McDonalds, filled the gas tank and watched for initiation.

As we watched, we took note of developing storms to the southeast of Des Moines, Iowa.  We soon realized that storm parameters were dropping where we were and increasing to our east, so we headed for the storm development.




We worked our way in front of the severe warned storms and worked our way eastward along with the storms, but the storms began to line out and the tornado potential dropped.




At this point, it appeared the storm chase was over, so we planned our route to head back west to take Brian back to his place.  We chose to go back to Hannibal to provide us a restaurant option before heading west on Highway 36. 

As we moved south out of Iowa into Missouri, we were watching new storms going up right in front of us.  It wasn't long before we were giving up the idea of a sit down dinner and put in place a plan to intercept the new storms.  As we neared the storm from the backside, we were given a view of several bright rainbows.





When we reached the Highway that would take us across the river into Quincy, Illinois, the storm seemed to ramp up.  We were in a position to have a perfect view of the storm's wall cloud.  We watched some minor rotation, but it struggled to gain any sustained spin.




We followed the storm through Quincy and into the backroads to the east of town as daytime turned to night.  The storms transitioned from individual cells into a large blob.  The storm still had large hail reported, so we went from chasing to being chased as we worked ourselves east and south to stay out of the way of those hail cores. 



We eventually were able to safely work back to the Hannibal bridge and back into Missouri where we made the trip all the way back across the state to take Brian back home. 





52 Hours  -  1,300 Miles


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



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