Shelf cloud near Bloomington, IN

Chase Recap:

This was one of those days which didn’t look like much of a chase day, but turned into one of my better chase days of 2010.

I originally woke up in the morning planning to work a full day at work. After looking things over in the morning, I decided that maybe I should give a try along the I-70 corridor in Western Indiana. It appeared that hodographs were curved, even for a short period of time and shear was good enough for some supercells and a possible tornado.

After talking with L.B. LaForce, we decided to hit the road around lunchtime. After I was on the road, the SPC issued their 1630Z outlook, which included a Moderate Risk for Wind and 5% tornado threat.

I picked up L.B. and headed south down I-69, stopping in Auburn to gas up and get some Sonic. We made real good time through Downtown Indy then west on I-70.

Supercells had begun to fire to my Southwest, and we ended up dropping south on 231 towards Spencer, IN. As we approached Spencer, the storm cell to our southwest went Tornado warned, and had a magnificent wall cloud as could be seen on the MIDSCAR live chase stream. We got into position to intercept, but due to the terrible roads and visibility, we weren’t ever really able to fully see the base of the storm. The temps were high and so was the humidity. There was a lot of rising scud into the storm along with a lot of cloud to ground lightning.

Eventually we followed it eastward towards Bloomington before the storm got too far ahead of us.

A line had formed behind, and we decided to wait east of Bloomington and intercept it, however, we were running very low on fuel so we had to head back to Bloomington and fuel up. I had enough time to throw a few gallons into the truck before setting up for the shelf cloud as it came into Bloomington, IN.

After the shelf cloud we headed back up towards Indianapolis in search of some Chick-fil-a. We stopped and got some awesome pictures of rainbows before getting dinner at Chick-fil-a. It was L.B.’s first time at Chick-fil-a and he seemed to like it.

The drive back to Michigan seemed long, and I arrived home sometime after 1am.