From Fargo, North Dakota we headed south-east. The plan was to drive through Minnesota and into Wisconsin back toward Indiana. Storms were set to fire in south-central Wisconsin, down through Iowa and into Nebraska.
While there would be storms, the problem was that there would not be enough rotating winds to form little distinct supercells which are best for chasing. The storms that would fire would be individual at first, but as the evening went on the storms would clump together creating a huge squall line. We were hoping that we could get to Wisconsin in time to see a few discrete cells before they built a line...
Being in Minnesota was completely different from North Dakota... the landscape changed dramatically from flat grassy plains to dense, hilly forests. Deciduous trees... they were everywhere! Hadn't seen so many since we left Missouri a few weeks ago, it seems! Minnesota would have been a terrible place to chase storms... and Wisconsin, we knew, wouldn't be much better.
As we drove through Wisconsin, heading south, I noticed a storm to our south that was starting to grow. We stopped at a gas station and took a look at it's mammatus clouds... they were well-developed, and thought that this storm might be pretty intense. However, there were still no shifting winds to make it spin... so a tornado didn't seem likely.
Our destination for dinner was Madison, Wisconsin. The storm was headed straight that way, and most of us were so hungry that we would rather eat than try to chase a storm in a forested terrain, next to an urban area. So we knew we had to make a quick decision within 30 minutes and get inside a restaurant before a hail storm pommeled us.
We ate in downtown Madison... most of the group went to an Irish pub, but I went with two other people a few stores down to a Subway, since it was cheaper and actually more in line with what I was hungry for. As we sat in the store we noticed the clouds starting to get dark. My friend and I looked at our radars on our phones... keeping an eye on the storm. Suddenly my friend looked at an alert on his phone, and there was a Tornado warning for our area! WHAAATT?? A funnel cloud had been spotted, heading east between [two places whose names I don't remember]. We asked the employees of Subway where those areas were, and they were like "Um, that's just west of here... that should be heading directly at us!"
Then my friend looked at his radar and noticed a couplet on the radar... oh crap! He ran next door and told our professor, who was at the Irish pub, that a tornado was heading our way. He came back, we told the employees of our Subway, and they locked the doors and we all waited.
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| Example picture of a "couplet". |
A doppler radar doesn't just detect rain... it also senses other things, such as storm movement, storm speed, etc. So... a velocity scan on a radar generally shows how fast a storm is moving, and in which direction it is moving! The picture on the left is an example of this.
Green represents storm-motion in one direction, and red represents the opposite direction. (Technically the directions are "toward" and "away from" the radar's location.) Generally a storm may have a little bit of both colors in it, since storms have the tendency to rotate slightly and movement isn't always uniform. When either color is at it's brightest, that means that winds are very strong. in that direction. And when both colors are strong, AND close together... that indicates strong rotation, swirling, and thus a potential funnel cloud or tornado.
Even though normal people would take cover during a tornado warning, my friends and I stood at the front of store to watch its progress. First it started to rain... then HARD. The winds started picking up… and then there was hail. A woman who had been sitting at the bus stop in front of the store got up from her seat and bolted for the door, banging to get in. She was shielding her five year old son from the hail.
We all continued to watch the storm progress, but thankfully the nickel-sized hail and powerful winds were the worst we ever saw of the storm. Quite an exciting end to our storm chase trip… a storm that we don’t chase, but rather a storm that chased us!
Our final stay for the trip will be in Rockford, Illinois, which is just south of the Wisconsin/Illinois border. We are all ready to go home... bickering starts easily between certain people, there's no comfortable position to sleep in the van anymore. It's been fun... but it's time to go home.
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