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April 18-20th Severe Weather


Chicago Storm

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Preliminary number of 15 tornadoes makes this one of the biggest April outbreaks in Indiana in terms of raw count. The amazing thing is that I haven't seen one picture or video of a tornado yet and I guess the reason why is that many of them were rain-wrapped/brief (plus it was dark). Makes you wonder how many of these went undocumented in the past.

Wow. That is quite a few. I also thought there was an EF3 in this outbreak.

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Louisville found 2 more, bringing the total in Indiana to 22. This is now the biggest April outbreak on record in the state, surpassing the old record of 21 in the Super Outbreak.

Wow this is starting to get pretty impressive, it is a good thing there wasn't a significant loss of life with the time of day for most of these tornadoes being nighttime.

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Wow this is starting to get pretty impressive, it is a good thing there wasn't a significant loss of life with the time of day for most of these tornadoes being nighttime.

Yep. Saving grace is that most of these tornadoes were pretty brief.

This event brings the preliminary 2011 total to 26 in Indiana, which is already above the yearly average.

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Yep. Saving grace is that most of these tornadoes were pretty brief.

This event brings the preliminary 2011 total to 26 in Indiana, which is already above the yearly average.

Brief and for the most part over rural areas. Had one of those gone through say Indy or Louisville, brief or not it could have caused significant damage.

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A very rare event in terms of how many of the tornadoes went unwarned (TOR WARN).

Generally I'm not a fan of blanket tornado warnings but I commend IND in this case. IWX was particularly poor as they missed all of theirs. It's tough because the couplets are often pretty transient in these setups and they can be gone within one or two scans.

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Csnavywx, Kevlon62, another member from NIU, and myself had a great chase yesterday.

We initially made it to Litchfield, IL where we sat for a while waiting for things to pop. We then raced northwest to get a good position on the tornadic cell crossing the Mississippi River. We caught up with it south of White Hall, IL where we saw a decent shelf cloud. We continued east where we encountered two gustnadoes. After seeing other cells start to affect this main supercell, we decided to drop off of it and pursue on of the cells moving in from the southwest.

The cell we picked was quickly tornado warned as we drove along the north side of the meso and south side of the FFD. It formed several wall clouds all of which quicly fell a part. A bowl shaped funnel then formed and we did see a brief touchdown down in on open field via dust/dirt at the surface, which then diminished. Suddently out of no where an inflow tail rapidly developed out of the cold/hail producing FFD to our north. This was very low to the ground, was accompanied by winds around 60mph and was rapidly being wrapped into the new rapidly forming funnel. The second tornado ended up dropping near Barnett, IL west of I-55 as we wached from the I-55/Route 108 JCT. The tornado crossed I-55 about 1 1/2 miles to our south and then proceeded to move northeast where it did hit a few structures near Honey Bend, IL before weakening/lifting southwest of Raymond, IL.

We then decided to drop down to I-70. On our we down there, we ended up getting hit by the line which produced winds around 60mph and knocked down small tree branches. We finally made it to I-70 where we ended up following the line for a bit and then sat in Greenfield, IL waiting for what was the St. Louis, IL supercell to pass. It produced winds around 60mph and hail around marble size.

Here are a few shots of the Honey Bend/I-55 tornado.

Great pics and write up. What an event. It was a dynamic day both in terms of our analysis and maneuvers and of course the weather itself. Glad to have been with the group. I have some decent video covering just about all of the tornadogenesis as we traveled east with the storm on Route 108. Both in terms of the wall cloud(s)/funnels and the inflow tail crossing the road from north to south in front of us. I'll need to get the main points of that up on Youtube, but I haven't had much time as of yet - hopefully by later tomorrow.

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Louisville found 2 more, bringing the total in Indiana to 22. This is now the biggest April outbreak on record in the state, surpassing the old record of 21 in the Super Outbreak.

Looks like I counted wrong. Total right now stands at 21 but with Louisville planning more surveys tomorrow, that number could rise.

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I would have to call this the Surprise Outbreak, at least as far as IN is concerned. No way I would have thought that at least 22 tors would be confirmed from this system even if many were relatively weak and in rural areas.

I'm surprised that we were able to pull this many tornadoes out of it given the fact that the storm mode was pretty linear, but that probably explains why most of them were very brief. A couple were on the ground for over 10 miles but besides that, it's mostly 3 miles or less (3 minutes or less given fast storm motions that night).

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Csnavywx, Kevlon62, NIU Jeff, and myself had a great chase yesterday.

We initially made it to Litchfield, IL where we sat for a while waiting for things to pop. We then raced northwest to get a good position on the tornadic cell crossing the Mississippi River. We caught up with it south of White Hall, IL where we saw a decent shelf cloud. We continued east where we encountered two gustnadoes. After seeing other cells start to affect this main supercell, we decided to drop off of it and pursue on of the cells moving in from the southwest.

The cell we picked was quickly tornado warned as we drove along the north side of the meso and south side of the FFD. It formed several wall clouds all of which quicly fell a part. A bowl shaped funnel then formed and we did see a brief touchdown down in on open field via dust/dirt at the surface, which then diminished. Suddently out of no where an inflow tail rapidly developed out of the cold/hail producing FFD to our north. This was very low to the ground, was accompanied by winds around 60mph and was rapidly being wrapped into the new rapidly forming funnel. The second tornado ended up dropping near Barnett, IL west of I-55 as we wached from the I-55/Route 108 JCT. The tornado crossed I-55 about 1 1/2 miles to our south and then proceeded to move northeast where it did hit a few structures near Honey Bend, IL before weakening/lifting southwest of Raymond, IL.

We then decided to drop down to I-70. On our we down there, we ended up getting hit by the line which produced winds around 60mph and knocked down small tree branches. We finally made it to I-70 where we ended up following the line for a bit and then sat in Greenfield, IL waiting for what was the St. Louis, IL supercell to pass. It produced winds around 60mph and hail around marble size.

Here are a few shots of the Honey Bend/I-55 tornado.

Finally put some video up...

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Here's a few pics from the 4/19 chase.

The first one is in Raymond Illinois where we sat for a few hours waiting on initiation. It's hard to believe it was in the mid 30s in northern Illinois, just a few hours drive north while it was a humid 80 here.

post-613-0-74864900-1303533384.jpg

This next pic is east of Carlinville just as we passed through the core. After we passed through the heavy rain the updraft region was visible to the southeast and already a bowl shaped lowering had developed.

post-613-0-61492600-1303533582.jpg

Here's the last pic I snapped before switching to video. Not impressive at all at this point, but the tornado had just began to stir up some dust and was about to intensify. Part of me wishes we had a third camera/video camera with just to capture the incredible formation of the ground scraping inflow cloud that formed just to our east.

post-613-0-09444300-1303533720.jpg

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