CheeselandSkies

22 hours ago, Jackstraw said:

I seldom chase anymore because about 10 years ago my buddy and I were about killed when a Honda Pilot with Harbor Freight flashing lights plastered on it and 3 Iphones hanging out the windows going 90 mph blew through a 4 way stop sign and missed us by inches. Our chase turned from the storm to them and when we caught them we put the fear of God into them. They said they were "pros" and I told them so is this baseball bat. After that nope. You have more chances of getting killed by another chaser than a storm nowadays.

That's where you tell them "So if you're 'pros,' who's paying you so I can sue them into oblivion for hiring your dumb a**?"

Fortunately, while I've seen a few "questionable" driving decisions, nothing egregious like that around storms...so far. 

Actually had a chase partner for the first time in a while on Tuesday. It was pretty low-key around the Galesburg/Kewanee/Princeton cell, probably because most people were either on the Kankakee storm or frantically trying to get back to it (which no doubt resulted in more bad driving). That sounded like a highly stressful intercept for just about everyone involved, and it seems it was only photogenic for a short time before rain wrapping and/or darkness set in, so I'm not too broken up about missing that.

 

25 minutes ago, A-L-E-K said:

plenty of time to book a trip to green bay, low rates!

Maybe not. The state girls' basketball tournament is happening at the Resch Center today through Saturday.

39 minutes ago, Malacka11 said:

Yesterday was a very interesting chase. It was my first real chasing trip since getting hit by a satellite back on 4/4/23, so I was eager to have another shot at making safety my number one priority™. I was on the big boy sup for a little while as it cycled and then got to enjoy watching the entire storm tighten up from a very safe vantage point the whole time. It was really cool to observe broader and then tighter rotation show up again on velocity while looking at things in front of us, but then after a while it became fairly clear that there was most certainly a big ass tornado somewhere right in front of us that we couldn't see. 

  

Check this shit out. Despite a plethora of other notable things we came across, it was a bit lame to not actually really "see" the nader of course, especially since we were on it for over an hour with that sig ass signature on it. But just this morning, at the very end of the ~30 seconds of shit phone footage I managed to take, I came across this frame:

I surmise it hit a transformer or something literally a second before I ended the video. 

Other observations include:

- Shortly before this point, we came across a crap load of massive hail still on the ground. At least good golf ball+ still sitting around in this sunny field in this particular cell's wake.

- Shortly before dark, right around the Indiana border,  the car (presumably another chaser) in front of us slowed way down and was just weird, then kept going. When we got to that point moments later, we registered that they'd been looking at one of those tree trunk remnants that's still a few meters tall standing right next to the road which was literally glowing orange and spitting embers. Kind of cool to come across a fresh lightning strike like that right in plain view, especially because the chase was essentially over at this point.

- On a more fucked note, on the way home on 65 or whatever, both "lanes" of the highway were shut down at a certain point. I'm actually proud of how quickly it dawned on me that it's a bad sign that both sides of the road were shut down because my attention span was... spant at this point. A semi and an SUV laid overturned in the ditch-style median between lanes. We rolled down the windows and saw that all of the trees on either side of the highway were significantly damaged for a very defined ~100 yard swath centered around where the crashed vehicles were. Pulling out radarscope, this appeared to be almost exactly where the couplet had tracked just a little bit ago so I'm almost positive it was indeed the actual damage path of the tornado and not just wind damage. It was a very sobering way to end what was otherwise probably my safest, most incident-free chase so far. 

 

 

 

Absolutely textbook "horseshoe" base and monster RFD cut in that first image.

I didn't give the potential for recovery enough credit, I assumed once the lake breeze boundary pushed through that would be sayonara for any supercell in the vicinity. Got on a cell just as it fired north of Galesburg and it looked briefly promising and went tornado-warned for a little while, but a whole bunch of updrafts went up all around and it quickly turned into a mess (potential for that was always there given the boundary-parallel flow, but I had hoped the capping would keep it in check).

I think I'm going for an initial target of Galesburg, IL. Multiple models seem to be maximizing the parameters there near 0Z Wednesday, and some initiate discrete convection. In addition, just anecdotally there seems to be something about the west side of the Illinois River valley from Beardstown on up to Peoria; multiple notable tornado events have occurred there in recent years.

7 hours ago, SchaumburgStormer said:

Warm front will ride along I-80 as they always seem to do this time of the year. 

Three Rivers and Union City, MI would like a word about that.

Tuesday looks legit, decent agreement among CAMS on discrete convection initiating within a favorable to highly favorable parameter space. The exception being the NAM 3KM which as has been noted, is likely due to its cool PBL bias.

It is a bit of an odd pattern for the location and time of year, bearing more of the hallmarks of a late spring to summer setup for the region (like June 22nd, 2015 and '16) than an early-mid March one (3/12/06 or 3/15/16). However the same was true for last Friday.

42 minutes ago, HillsdaleMIWeather said:

Round two for basically the whole area Tuesday

NAM and experimental CAMS have been quite consistent on a high-end parameter space developing over northern Illinois Tuesday afternoon/evening, with a signal for discrete convection able to take advantage of it. At this time I'm planning for it to be my first chase of the year.

The 0Z GFS has us getting like 7" of snow over the next 42 hours? That is...not in the forecast, lol.

9 hours ago, DocATL said:

Agree…for the Mountain West.

That would be good, because they need it as per @A-L-E-K's post in the banter thread.

On 2/4/2026 at 9:31 AM, A-L-E-K said:

denver is ugly but most of new america is

We allegedly won the Cold War but somewhere along the line decided to adopt Soviet architecture.

We need to start an American WX winter season thread bingo card.

East coast pattern

zzzzzzzz

(Next month) be rockin'

CAD

(Beavis rant)

...etc.

51 minutes ago, A-L-E-K said:

dusty and brown

hope we're all ready to smell wildfire all summer

 

 

Upcoming pattern shift gives some hope the West will get some snow soon...but yeah that's not good.

1 hour ago, Powerball said:

Definitely highly skeptical of the current projections beyond the 7 day period with a supposed PV stretch (some are calling it a SSW event, but that's such an overused term and not really accurate) happening...

One thing I've come to learn, after considering it a dirty word following '14 and '18, is that not all SSWEs are created equal (as in, they don't always put the cold into our neck of the woods, which I'd be just fine with given the brutal stretch we're only just finally coming out of).

It...might snow tonight.

Maybe I've missed it, but if not I'm surprised no one has mentioned it's the 15th anniversary of GHD I.

On 1/30/2026 at 5:45 PM, Chinook said:

Hey guys, I am thinking of getting a new laptop because I've heard computer prices are going up. I have a laptop from 2019 that is working well. And by the way, whoever answered my question about fixing my computer battery, thanks a lot. It cost me a good bit to fix my battery, but it was necessary.

I was shopping for new laptops, and possibly refurbished laptops. I am not sure I want to buy someone else's 3-year-old laptop. That might already have a lot of wear and tear, when a new laptop could be nearly the same price.

I was also considering the possibility of Linux, which I have never done before. If you look up information about Windows 11, they will say that it's bloated and it's spying on you. But I might still go with it. I have questions about radar programs GRLevel3 and Radarscope. They're not designed for Linux at all. Can they be run in Linux anyway?  That sort of question is what's going through my mind-- Linux is an unknown. I don't know if some of my favorite programs (or files,) will do the same thing on Linux. I know GRLevel3 and Radarscope aren't written for Linux.

If I go with Windows 11, I know my GRLevel3 can be put on it with my license code. I assume Radarscope won't have this capability and I could purchase it again. (Any thoughts on the Radarscope? I got the full package for Radarscope a while back, so I could see 4 panels. I don't know if that could transfer over to a new computer.)

One of the things I've struggled with is this: is trying to determine if a new laptop's monitor will be bright and as colorful as it could be. I want one that's above average. It's tough to tell from computer descriptions on the "nits" and "%NTSC"  I'm pretty sure 300 nits could appear quite bright, but I've heard there's better brightness. Are 60Hz and 45% NTSC reasonable? I like a good display. (I'm not exactly sure what I have.)

I'm kind of assuming Intel i5 and/or Ryzen-5 series does fairly well if you're not running modern graphics-heavy games. There's a part of me that says, "go with i7" because I don't want to be running something that's too slow in 5 years.

I've also noticed there's not a lot of 14" laptops listed when you search. For me, 14" is fine for portabilty.

I don't quite understand it when the description says "AI Copilot+ laptop."

Tangentially related: I thought my 3 1/2-year old desktop computer (Bought in summer 2022, previous one lasted nearly 10 years and only died because the power supply burned up because I'd let the fan get completely clogged with dust) was shitting the bed. Starting about two months ago it would randomly freeze, regardless of what I was doing (even just reading a site like this forum, as the only tab in Firefox and no other programs open). It would either reboot without warning, or just abruptly go completely unresponsive to mouse and keyboard inputs and require a hard reboot. Sometimes it would go an hour or two, other times (and this was seemingly becoming more and more frequent) it would do it every five-ten minutes.

I opened up the case and vacuumed out the fans (they were somewhat dusty, but far from clogged), ran the hardware diagnostics and everything came back good, installed all the BIOS and driver updates that were available. None of it made any difference and as a last resort before taking it to a repair shop, I went out and bought a $130 UPS/battery backup at Best Buy to plug it (and the monitor, and my external HDDs, etc) into.

Lo and behold, we're coming up on 48 hours of up time since I did this after work on Friday, and NO ABRUPT FREEZES/REBOOTS!

Couple of weeks ago I was seeing maps that said AA temps for Feb. Shocker.

12Z GFS is disgusting. Endless CAD through the end of the run. Although *at least* the last 200 hours of each run of that model are a total crapshoot, I'd really prefer a different look at some point.

58 minutes ago, madwx said:

If we’re gonna do it we might as well do it big. Hoping we can challenge some 2019/2014 levels here 

As long as it doesn't last for 8 weeks straight.

21 hours ago, sbnwx85 said:

No bugs at least

That wasp @A-L-E-K photographed better have skedaddled back to its hibernation hidey-hole.

*Looks at 18Z GFS and cries*

I HATE prolonged deep cold. Looks like those flagging the 2013-'14 similarities were right. Can only hope unlike that year it breaks in time to not totally bollocks season apart from a 3-day sequence in mid-F*CKING JUNE.

4 hours ago, Chicago916 said:

Wednesday/Thursday clipper uptrend. Or do we not care cuz it's not a big dog?

1 hour ago, Geoboy645 said:

Meanwhile here around Madison, we just had one of most localized snowfall events we have had in a while. The original forecast for Friday into Saturday was 1-2" Friday morning and then another Friday night. Instead we had a localized Fgen(?) band setup Friday night over the I-94 corridor and just sit for about 18 hours. With some occasionally heavy rates of 1-1.5" of an hour, Madison ended up recording 5" of snow on 1/16 and 5.6 on 1/17, although the snow depth doesn't quite represent that because of settling.. This was a very dry and fluffy snow too, so we could have localized ground blizzard like conditions tomorrow with the cold blast. Thing is, this band was not much wider than Dane County. I have some snow up here, but like 3-4" not 6+. And if you go N to Portage or S to Janesville they may have like 2-3 OTG. This honestly feels like a summer MCS that forms and doesn't move and dumps 5-6" of rain in a night, but just snow instead.

Yeah. I work in local news and based on our mets' forecasts I was not expecting it to snow at all yesterday beyond the early morning.

On 1/16/2026 at 9:30 PM, Baum said:

NWS Pants down again:

INCLUDING THE CITIES OF LODI, SAUK CITY, WAUKESHA, PORTAGE,   GRAFTON, MADISON, CEDARBURG, MILWAUKEE, MENOMONEE FALLS,   DODGEVILLE, WATERTOWN, PRAIRIE DU SAC, MUSKEGO, MAYVILLE, BEAVER   DAM, JEFFERSON, WEST BEND, HARTFORD, LAKE WISCONSIN, MINERAL   POINT, BARABOO, WAUPUN, MEQUON, REEDSBURG, BARNEVELD, FORT   ATKINSON, BROOKFIELD, GERMANTOWN, NEW BERLIN, AND COLUMBUS   809 PM CST FRI JAN 16 2026       ..WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 AM CST SATURDAY     * WHAT...SNOW. 1 TO 2 INCHES HAVE FALLEN AND ADDITIONAL SNOW   ACCUMULATIONS OF 1 TO 3 INCHES WITH TOTALS APPROACHING 3 TO 5   INCHES OVERNIGHT INTO SATURDAY MORNING.     * WHERE...PORTIONS OF SOUTH CENTRAL AND SOUTHEAST WISCONSIN.     * WHEN...UNTIL 9 AM CST SATURDAY.    

On top of that, it snowed most of the rest of the day yesterday (which was NOT forecast). We actually set a daily record due to the ridiculous ratios.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1ZDN338aPL/

2 hours ago, DocATL said:

The Wisconsin-Illinois state line is a naturally occurring snow boundary. It’s wild.

Just like it is in the opposite direction for warm fronts/tornadic supercells, with very rare exceptions.