4/25-4/28 Severe and Heavy Rain Threat

[Lightning]

2 hours ago, frostfern said:

Storms actually missed north yesterday.  There was some decent hail near Ludington.  This just isn't a Great Lakes setup though.  It's a plains setup. 

Best bet for stronger convection farther north and east looks to be next week Thursday.  Still uncertainty though.  Still way better pattern than last year at this time when there were hardly any storms anywhere in the US.  Keeping my fingers crossed there is no blocking again this May.  That just killed spring storm season last year.

Oh sorry, I was referring the band that lifted north overnight as some models had strong storm well into my area in the morning hours of today (which only turned out to be some okay rain without any thunder). 

The stuff in Ludington yesterday was never projected to come close to my area so I honestly wasn't really paying any attention to it.  Ludington to Manistee is one area that does well very consistently with t-storms as does Benton Harbor to Coldwater area.

Yeah I am also hoping May is much better t-storm wise.  We shall see.

[SchaumburgStormer]

Only .71" over the past 3 days. Not exactly a washout. 

[hawkeye_wx]

My three-day rain total is 0.64", well below what models predicted.  Many locations north and west of Cedar Rapids got less than that.

[mnchaserguy]

Managed to see two tornadoes in southern IA on Friday between Creston and Afton, IA. Both have been rated EF2. I also came into Osceola right after it was hit by what is the strongest (and also smallest) tornado of the group based on the damage surveys. Also included a screenshot of my location on radar. I was absolutely surrounded by tornado warnings, including being in three different warnings at once at one point.


.

[CheeselandSkies]

On 4/29/2024 at 9:39 AM, mnchaserguy said:

Managed to see two tornadoes in southern IA on Friday between Creston and Afton, IA. Both have been rated EF2. I also came into Osceola right after it was hit by what is the strongest (and also smallest) tornado of the group based on the damage surveys. Also included a screenshot of my location on radar. I was absolutely surrounded by tornado warnings, including being in three different warnings at once at one point.


.

Great shots! I am still scratching my head as to how I managed to be in pretty much the same area at the same time and get jack squat for quality shots. I was on the storm that produced the initial Creston tornado when it first went tornado-warned southwest of Bedford, and observed this nice wall cloud just west of IA-148:
 

Taking 148 north through Bedford, I had to drive practically underneath it to get to my next east option. It was here that road options quickly became an issue, as I became trapped in a maze of unpaved roads trying go as fast as possible without sliding off as the base outran me and started producing. With some white knuckle driving I managed to make it back to pavement and emerge onto US-169 just east of Shannon City, a little ahead of the longitude of the couplet according to RadarScope. Blasting north and cresting a hill near Arispe at 7:34 (per timestamp of cell phone pictures I took which did not turn out through the raindrop-spattered windshield), this was my view ahead. One of those lowerings under the base is surely the first Creston tornado, but which?

Hindsight being 20/20 I should have taken a left instead of a right where 169 intersects US-34 and then I would have easily been able to see the second tornado. Instead I pursued the original cell to north of Lorimor and by the time I finally got a good view under the base, the tornado had lifted.

 

Hills and trees to the southwest obscured my view of the base of the second cell; so noting that it was also tornado-warned with an intense couplet I viewed this more as something to avoid getting run over by rather than try to see. I followed the base of the original cell a little further to the northeast, IIRC it later produced additional tornadoes but I broke off due to darkness rapidly setting in. I went back to 169 and found a spot that looked to be clear of the path of any couplets to pull over and wait out the RFD with blinding rain and strong, but fortunately not too crazy winds to clear the highway before heading north to Winterset and then toward home.

[mnchaserguy]

Great shots! I am still scratching my head as to how I managed to be in pretty much the same area at the same time and get jack squat for quality :twister:shots. I was on the storm that produced the initial Creston tornado when it first went tornado-warned southwest of Bedford, and observed this nice wall cloud just west of IA-148:
 

Taking 148 north through Bedford, I had to drive practically underneath it to get to my next east option. It was here that road options quickly became an issue, as I became trapped in a maze of unpaved roads trying go as fast as possible without sliding off as the base outran me and started producing. With some white knuckle driving I managed to make it back to pavement and emerge onto US-169 just east of Shannon City, a little ahead of the longitude of the couplet according to RadarScope. Blasting north and cresting a hill near Arispe at 7:34 (per timestamp of cell phone pictures I took which did not turn out through the raindrop-spattered windshield), this was my view ahead. One of those lowerings under the base is surely the first Creston tornado, but which?

Hindsight being 20/20 I should have taken a left instead of a right where 169 intersects US-34 and then I would have easily been able to see the second tornado. Instead I pursued the original cell to north of Lorimor and by the time I finally got a good view under the base, the tornado had lifted.

 
Hills and trees to the southwest obscured my view of the base of the second cell; so noting that it was also tornado-warned with an intense couplet I viewed this more as something to avoid getting run over by rather than try to see. I followed the base of the original cell a little further to the northeast, IIRC it later produced additional tornadoes but I broke off due to darkness rapidly setting in. I went back to 169 and found a spot that looked to be clear of the path of any couplets to pull over and wait out the RFD with blinding rain and strong, but fortunately not too crazy winds to clear the highway before heading north to Winterset and then toward home.

I observed both of my tornadoes while I was on highway 34. I saw the first one when I was a couple miles west of Creston. It touched down at about 7:20. The tornado itself touched down east of Creston, just south of highway 34. The second tornado I saw was from a different storm that had come up from behind the previous tornadic storm and had a nearly identical path as the first tornado I saw. This one touched down at about 7:50 pm.

Here is the screenshot I took of the radar as the second tornado I saw was going on. I’ll see if I can explain what happened and maybe it’ll help you figure out why you missed it. I highlighted three different couplets. The top one is the couplet from the tornado that actually went through Creston (near the hospital). I believe this was pretty rain wrapped based on what I saw on radar. The middle couplet is the one that produced the first tornado I saw. I ended up getting behind this storm due to camera malfunction and slow traffic going through Creston. The bottom couplet is the storm that produced the second tornado I saw. I had given up on trying to catch up to the middle couplet and noticed the bottom couplet had really gotten going. Instead of continuing east through Afton on highway 34, I turned around in Afton and headed back west a mile or two to find a clearing in the hills and trees to get a view of the base. Within about minutes of getting a view, the tornado was on the ground. It would have been easy to overlook the storms behind you if you were focused on the original tornadic storms. It probably worked out in my favor that I had to give up on the other storms and allowed me to see what was going on behind me. Hope that makes sense. Definitely a difficult chase with the hills, trees, and bad road network.


.

[CheeselandSkies]

1 hour ago, mnchaserguy said:

I observed both of my tornadoes while I was on highway 34. I saw the first one when I was a couple miles west of Creston. It touched down at about 7:20. The tornado itself touched down east of Creston, just south of highway 34. The second tornado I saw was from a different storm that had come up from behind the previous tornadic storm and had a nearly identical path as the first tornado I saw. This one touched down at about 7:50 pm.

Here is the screenshot I took of the radar as the second tornado I saw was going on. I’ll see if I can explain what happened and maybe it’ll help you figure out why you missed it. I highlighted three different couplets. The top one is the couplet from the tornado that actually went through Creston (near the hospital). I believe this was pretty rain wrapped based on what I saw on radar. The middle couplet is the one that produced the first tornado I saw. I ended up getting behind this storm due to camera malfunction and slow traffic going through Creston. The bottom couplet is the storm that produced the second tornado I saw. I had given up on trying to catch up to the middle couplet and noticed the bottom couplet had really gotten going. Instead of continuing east through Afton on highway 34, I turned around in Afton and headed back west a mile or two to find a clearing in the hills and trees to get a view of the base. Within about minutes of getting a view, the tornado was on the ground. It would have been easy to overlook the storms behind you if you were focused on the original tornadic storms. It probably worked out in my favor that I had to give up on the other storms and allowed me to see what was going on behind me. Hope that makes sense. Definitely a difficult chase with the hills, trees, and bad road network.


.

Yep. That's exactly what happened. I had committed to following 169 north (which involved going east on 34 from Afton) after the storm that produced the second of the three Creston-Afton-Macksburg area EF2s. Here is a lightning-backlit and contrast enhanced 500% zoomed-in grab from my GoPro as I was passing through Afton. I think I have a distant glimpse of it here, but that's it.



As I said in my earlier post, by the time I finally got a good view under the base near Lorimor, the tornado was gone (as evidenced by the relatively weak couplet in your RadarScope grab) and the storm didn't produce for me again before dark. Meanwhile, the view toward the third couplet was completely blocked by hills and trees west of 169, so I just considered it as something to avoid getting run over by rather than try to catch.

[mnchaserguy]

Yep. That's exactly what happened. I had committed to following 169 north (which involved going east on 34 from Afton) after the storm that produced the second of the three Creston-Afton-Macksburg area EF2s. Here is a lightning-backlit and contrast enhanced 500% zoomed-in grab from my GoPro as I was passing through Afton. I think I have a distant glimpse of it here, but that's it.



As I said in my earlier post, by the time I finally got a good view under the base near Lorimor, the tornado was gone (as evidenced by the relatively weak couplet in your RadarScope grab) and the storm didn't produce for me again before dark. Meanwhile, the view toward the third couplet was completely blocked by hills and trees west of 169, so I just considered it as something to avoid getting run over by rather than try to catch.

Your last point is exactly why I missed the Osceola EF2 (which turns out was the smallest but strongest of the tors in that area). Saw the couplet to my south for that tor really get going after my second tor had lifted but without a good road option south and it getting close to dark it wasn’t worth risking a drive into Osceola with the couplet heading right for town, even though it may have given me a view of it in hindsight.


.