Chased the cells from St. Cloud through the Twin Cites, Hugo, and White Bear Lake.
Funnel just W of Big Lake. Just before it was wrapped in a hail curtain. There wasn’t much of the day I didn’t spend getting hailed on. Just couldn’t seem to get out of it. This was on the first cell.
Lowering near Forest Lake – 2nd cell (Thanks to Randy for the heads up on this one)
Lowering near White Bear Lake – 3rd cell
Had to do a quick trip to Menards this afternoon. On the way back I made a pass through the damaged area that was closed off to the public yesterday. A lot of roads still blocked so I walked in. Saw two garages destroyed, a lot of trees twisted and stripped of leaves. Same look in this neighborhood as two years ago when Blaine was hit just a mile and a half to the south of this track.
This used to be a garage of a house that was getting remodeled. Facing north, debris is off to the left, but unsure if it was pushed off that way to gain access to the back yard, or blew off that direction. No one was home when I was taking the picture.
A second garage.
Really disappointed when we woke up and find we were smack dab in the middle of two moderate risk areas. What happened to IA? After looking things over, it looked like MN was going to fire early, around 2pm or so, and I really didn’t want to make the dash for home just to be late by an hour or two, so opted to take advantage of the pool, and head into IA later to chase what looked like some pretty good conditions there.
We hung out at the hotel until checkout, then started off into IA, planning on driving 100 miles in or so, then re-evaluate based on current surface conditions. Within about an hour, MN looked like it may hold off long enough for us to get there, so we made a dash north, hoping for better winds, and a shorter trek home after the chase.
After hitting Jackson, we saw the cells starting to fire off to the north and decided to watch for a while to see if the line continued to the south. No such luck so we decided to head for Mankato, only to find out 169 is closed. There went our quick north road options,
By then the cells were firing in IA, and looked like they may be drifting to the NE, so we took off down 90 again playing catchup, only to re-evaluate once we hit Austin and realized the cells were taking a straight East route, putting us too far North on the already tornado warned cells in IA. We then turned north, thinking that the cells near Faribault may build into something…. which they didn’t. Very nice tower, but nothing to show for it underneath.
And then headed for home in practically clear skies all the way up 35. Pretty obvious then that the northern cells sucked up any moisture that would have fed anything in southern MN.
Once we got back to Blaine, we did a quick tour of the damage areas. Found damage from 121st and Hanson, (we didn’t check any further to the West, initial touchdown was supposed to have been a mile to the west?) and followed the damage path all the way to Radisson where we turned around and headed for home.
We saw various levels of damage along the way, a lot of full size trees pulled out by the roots, light house damage, and were told that houses were pulled off the foundations northwest of Jefferson and 117th. Lighter damage on the East side of 65, partially due to lack of trees? Full size swing sets tossed on their sides, some sides pulled off the sides of houses and garages, a lot of garage doors pushed in including some on East facing houses.
Both pictures below are from damage East of hwy 65.
A couple of 2×4′s in the side of a house. Garage to the left in the picture is to the East of me. Talking to one of the neighbors, the boards were sticking 3 ft into the neighbors living room.
A table? that was picked up and thrown into this house.
With the three day weekend coming up, and not being able to make it out once yet, Decided to head to NE where things looked pretty good for some tornadoes. Not as good as the previous couple of days, but still a decent chance. Talked Max and Mandy into it, and got going about 6am Saturday morning with an initial target of Lincoln. A really cold drive, lower 50′s with a lot of wind all the way down.
We set up slightly south of Lincoln and caught some lunch in one of the local parks down there. Decided after watching the temps and dp’s creeping up to our west that we may have to adjust our target. Starting to see some precip break out to our NW so we started in that direction. Line slowly built to the south so we were able to get on a couple of those cells. Saw a nice wall cloud. Didn’t have very many opportunities to stop and take pictures as it kept sliding to the ne over the top of us. We’d have to drive north through the core, then east ahead of it just to keep up. Must have punched that core about 5 times that day. Luckily only pea size hail. In the end it was a pretty nice wall cloud, very obviously feeding off the rain core ahead of it. I suspect just too much wind on the ground for it to produce anything though.
Ran by the Tiv, Dow, and their entourage, what a circus that is. Reminds of the black vans on twister. They stopped and set up to look at the same wall we were chasing. No way they could have caught up after that. And I thought it was illegal to drive with the lightbars going? They’re group didn’t seem to have a problem doing it.
Also ran across another group, I thought it may have been the Tamu guys, another bunch of trailers and big pickups with all kinds of gear they were going to deploy. The equipment in the back of the pickups looked like survey tripods with anonometers on top. Pretty sure the first initial was T on the side of the trucks.
Pretty sure we chased the line up to Norfolk, then gave up as the cells were collapsing at that point. Our’s still had a wall cloud on it, not sure how, because it was obvious that the top was collapsing big time at that point. Headed for Sioux Falls to set up for the Iowa chase on Sunday.
Made the trek to North Branch this morning with the kids for a couple of hours of watching the rockets go up.
I was out doing a father / daughter dinner with Em today and we were surprised by a great rainbow as we came out of the resturaunt. Some of the deepest purples I’ve ever seen.
Not the best picture. All I had with was the 1mp camera.
