CheeselandSkies

4 hours ago, Chicago Storm said:

Just got back from guiding a storm chasing tour over the past week.

Easily the worst stretch I've experienced since I started doing these back in 2021.

Gambled on an early to mid-April tour and we lucked out with a couple of decent storms on relatively low-key/conditional days. It was guided by Trey Greenwood and Ethan Moriarty (YouTubers Convective Chronicles and June First, respectively), so it was a lot of fun getting to hang out and talk storms with those guys.
 

However ironically the best was on my way home (I had actually cancelled my flight plans and shortened my time on the tour to drive out to OKC instead, which was the reason I was in my vehicle and able to chase this day, also ironic for someone from Wisconsin I had started the day in Wichita and marathonned 9 hours to see a tornado in Minnesota):

Ya. AI ≠ "good."

Does the clearing now pushing from the eastern half of IA/NE MO into NW IL/SW WI mean anything or is it too little, too late? SPC pretty thoroughly chopped away our severe probabilities on the northern end with the 1630 update.

00Z HRRR: We're so back?

2 hours ago, TheNiño said:

No moderate risk on the day 2 so I’ll probably be wrong. But I still see high risk potential in the Springfield area tomorrow. I’m willing to take the weenie penalty if I’m wrong but at the very least there should be a moderate there. I don’t know I’m just some fucking guy.

I would agree with you if there was less of a signal for extensive morning convection on the CAMs, however...

it's an interesting disagreement between the mesoscale models (NAM, RAP) and the CAMs (3K NAM, HRRR). The former two build a very potent environment into east IA/N IL/even S WI late Monday afternoon/evening, which the latter two fail to do because of the impacts of the aforementioned incessant convection.

Seems like all the CAMs to come into range thus far (including 00Z HRRR) obliterate the warm sector north of about I-70 with incessant convection through midday. A couple days ago there was talk of an abnormally far east EML advection preventing this, what changed?

16 minutes ago, sbnwx85 said:

Reminds me of the story of the 1965 outbreak and Northern Indiana issued a blanket tornado warning for every county because it couldn’t keep up. Completely different set up and reasoning but still gives me a chuckle

IIRC Birmingham or Huntsville also did that during the evening of 4/3/74. James Spann essentially did that for 4/27/11 when he told his viewers in advance there were going to be so many tornadoes and warnings it would be tough for them to keep up, so to treat any storm that approaches as dangerous and take cover as if it had a tornado (which on that day in Alabama, it probably did).

Got this guy on Monday.
 

Was on a tornado-warned nasty green HP near Dodgeville/Barneveld/Mt. Horeb, WI Tuesday evening.

Other photos from recent chases in my storm chasing Flickr album:

https://flickr.com/photos/andywskies/albums/72157655308092622/

CAMS (apart from the ever-aggressive RRFS-A) have generally kept southern Wisconsin dry overnight, and the 00Z HRRR continues that trend. Not sure why were still in SPC's slight risk.

26 minutes ago, cyclone77 said:

SPC risk needs to be shaved off over northwest IL and eastern IA.  Will be a whiff east/southeast.

Yeah. I have to resist the temptation to chase based solely on that and the HRRR UH swaths, which are portrayed 50-100 miles north of any surface-based instability except maybe from north-central Indiana eastward.

2 hours ago, pen_artist said:

Good breakdown by Trey on the Kankakee supercell

 

So pumped I get to chase with him starting in a little over a week.

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

 

 

 

Honestly couldn't ask for a better look across all guidance for the start of my chase tour. Now I just have to hope the airports are still semi-functional by the 2nd. Heck, with that look on the models I'll hitchhike to OKC if need be.

On 3/15/2026 at 9:34 PM, cyclone77 said:

Funny that this evening we're dealing with a developing blizzard when 10 years ago on this date I was looking at this down by Good Hope IL.

 

Great shot showing the dramatic carved-out updraft structure. Possibly would have gotten this one except my chase partner couldn't leave work in Madison until 4. We got a brief look at the Trivoli tornado from the west edge of Hanna City, which I believe was produced from the same storm or one that evolved out of it after a merger.

We were not really expecting a tornado by that point in the chase as it had gotten dark and the storm had looked like junk on radar just minutes before, so we were rather spooked by the rapid turnaround and hightailed it out of there before we could get a better shot.

20 hours ago, A-L-E-K said:

Signs of a return to action in the extended?

Chase tour runs April 3-12!

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.