StansWeather.net

Thanks to my dedication to watch my beloved Illini team lose in the sweet 16 to Duke, I passed up an opportunity to chase on Saturday in the plains. It would have been a good run to W. Oklahoma, but there’s always next time right? 🙂 Anyway, the same system that dropped 7 tornadoes in the Kansas/Oklahoma was heading my way on Sunday and that meant there was a slight chance we’d get something to chase here. Granted the system was weakening, but there was still a chance. The early morning SPC Day 1 outlook showed northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin in a slight risk for severe weather with the main threat damaging winds. (a whopping 2% tornado risk too!) I mulled over the forecast models and initially wanted to target somewhere between Peru and Bloomington Illinois. Unfortunately there was a lot of cloud cover from the leftover storms that was hindering our storm chances. (share the wealth people!)

I continued to monitor the situation throughout the day and there wasn’t much happening. I didn’t want to leave too early and go on some wild goose chase, yet I didn’t want to wait too long and miss something either. I decided to wait for the 2:00pm (20z) Day 1 outlook to see what the SPC was thinking. They ended up shifting the severe threat to eastern Illinois which kind of surprised me a bit. At this time, I started seeing some very small storms go up north of Bloomington and wondered if this was the beginning of the storms. I was ready to leave but not sure where to head. My initial target was too far west and a southern target didn’t have much instability and energy to work with. The best ingredients were along the NE IL/NW IN border, so I decided to head north to my popular destination of Kankakee. (must be a new theme to chase in the same area as many times as possible this year!)

Finally, a slight risk somewhere in Illinois! I had been watching this day on the models for the past week. While it would have been nice for this to happen on Sunday, I figured I’d do my best to get a chase in anyway. The Day 1 outlook had northern and central IL in a slight risk with the main threat being large hail and damaging winds. (better than 4-8″ of snow right?!) Unlike my Jan 3rd bust to Missouri, we actually had some CAPE forecasted! (about freaking time!) There wasn’t the nice pool of mid-60 degree dew points to work with, but with the strong low pressure I figured it might still fire something. Unfortunately I couldn’t allocate the entire day to chasing as I had to work, so I had to do what I could with the time after work. Luckily I was able to work through lunch and leave an hour early.

As soon as the clock struck 3:00pm, I bolted out the door and headed home to get the gear. As I was setting up the laptop/GPS, I plugged in the wifi card to get a last minute weather update before heading out. There wasn’t too much on radar other than stuff way up in northern IL and southern WI, which was a tad out of my range for this chase day. I continued to focus on my target area of Kankakee and see what would happen. I finally departed Champaign at 3:30pm and made the trek north on I-57. On the way up, I noticed lots of junk trying to go up but nothing that made me want to stop. As I approached the Kankakee area, I finally encountered some decent amounts of rainfall. For about 5 seconds, I had some small hail pelting the car that got me all excited again. 🙂 I headed north of Kankakee to get out into the country and observed a really spiffy sunlit cloud structure which begged to have its picture taken!