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 alot 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!)
After loading up the gear and topping off the gas tank, I headed north around 2:30pm. It was mostly cloudy on the way up there though I could see numerous breaks in the clouds. I attempted to download some weather data on the way, but the area I was in didn’t support data connections so I was going totally visual. (old school chasing again!) I decided to go north of Kankakee and get off at Manteno to get a better view of whatever was coming my way. I stopped about 9 miles west of Manteno in NW Kankakee county to watch the sky. I saw a couple of turkey towers, but nothing that looked like it was going to do anything. I finally got online and discovered there were no watches, warnings, or any decent looking storms anywhere in the area. Blah! (what’s that 4 letter word for crappy chase that rhymes with dust?)
While I was weighing my options of whether to go back home or not, I started seeing a shelf cloud off in the distance. I had about 15 minutes of video left on one of my video tapes, so I decided to shoot some of this nifty thing. As it approached, I noticed alot of motion in the clouds but nothing organized. During the time, I didn’t see any lightning so I continued to stay outside and watch this thing. About the time it got a few miles from me, the temperature and humidity took quite a nosedive in a very short amount of time. It started to rain, so I packed up the tripod/camera and hopped back in the car. I sat there for a little while longer while I got pounded with heavy rain, but never did see or hear any hail.
I took one more peek at the radar and there definitely wasn’t anything to continue chasing after, so I decided to call it a chase and head back home. I was pretty much slammed with heavy rainfall the whole trip back which made the travel a little slower than normal. I arrived back home a little after 7:00pm and it was noticably cooler than when I had left.
Final thoughts:
Techinically the chase was a bust, but at least I got to see a pretty nifty shelf cloud. Hopefully April will bring some better chases to the area.
Total Chase Miles: 190 miles