It's been quite a night!

[miraje]

Ok, I spent all day looking at the weather data thinking to myself..."hmm, any severe weather that happens will be pretty damn close to us, but there's no way I'm going chasing. I have too much to do!" So the hours went on and I saw a cluster of storms pop up on radar about halfway between Des Moines and Omaha, and they were moving NNE at a really freakin' fast clip (roughly 60 mph). At that point I decided that I'd only chase if they were tornadic and got really close to Ames so that I wouldn't have to drive that far. One really nice looking supercell tracked about 60 miles west of us, but at the rate of speed they were going there would have been no way in hell for me to intercept it in time. So I sat and watched the radar here at my apartment while talking to Jeremy on the phone. About ten or fifteen minutes later another storm popped up and began to develop nicely just southeast of the first storm, and it looked like it would pass just barely to the west of Ames. Then a tornado warning was issued for it while it was still a good distance away, so I thought "ah, what the hell. I'll drive out west of town and watch it go by. I probably won't see anything, but it's not like I'm going very far."

So I drove out to west Ames and parked on the Country Road X overpass of Highway 30 (It's the Lincoln Way/Napier exit for you locals...centered on this map). I had a great view from there, so I just waited for the storm to come to me...or at least that's what I thought I was doing. Jeremy was watching the radar and other information online and told me that I needed to get further south and west if I was going to see anything. The storm looked really good on radar at that point, and I think he thought the storm would weaken somewhat by the time it got to where I was. Taking his advice, I hopped back into my car and drove south on X and then headed west a little ways on 270th Street (the yellow paved road between Luther and Kelley). At some point I topped a hill and glanced off to my southwest to see a large gray...something extending all the way to the ground with clearing around it. I was so far away that I couldn't tell for sure if it was a tornado or a rain shaft until it started to noticeably shrink right there while I was looking at it.



Jeremy was trying to tell me that it wasn't possible for me to be seeing the tornado from where I was, and it was a little hard to see, but it was indeed the tornado! I wasn't expecting it to be a large tornado, but uh...that's how it looked up close at the time.

I got a few more fuzzy pictures of it before it just up and dissipated on me. I didn't give up on it, though. Instead I just stayed where I was and got a few pictures of the scud clouds off to my west. They looked kinda cool in front of the setting sun. I look of to the southwest again, and holy shit! It's back! And it's uh...coming kind of right at me! OH FUCK. All the while I'm talking to Jeremy on my cell phone, and he's telling me to call the National Weather Service office to report what I was seeing, but it was hard to concentrate on that while I was fucking flying south as fast as I could on some random dirt road to get out of the tornado's way. I agreed to call, though, so I was dialing the number with my hands shaking like no other as I'm racing down the road watching this HUGE cloud of gray getting bigger and bigger off to my right with the winds picking up around me. Yes, that was probably a run-on sentence, and that was about how my brain was operating at the time. It was probably something like OMG TORNADO! OMG WATCH THE ROAD! OMG WINDS BLOWING ME OFF THE ROAD! OMG JUST DIAL THE FUCKING NUMBER! OMG WHAT DID THEY ASK ME TO SAY AGAIN?! OMG TORNADO! OMG DEBRIS! OMG THEY WANT ME TO LEAVE A MESSAGE. OMG WHAT DO I SAY? OMG TORNADO! I managed to sort of spit out my name and that I was an ISU student and to say how many miles and in what the direction that the tornado was from Luther. I forgot to put ISU METEOROLOGY student in there, so it ended up making it into the Storm Reports as being reported by the public instead of by a trained spotter. Oops. You would be nervous and scatterbrained too if you were in my position at the time.

Eventually I got far enough to the south and east that I was a safe distance from the tornado, so I got out and took some pictures.







Ok, so that thing's only what..two miles off to my west in those pictures. I drove about two miles south and a mile east from where I started, so...yeah. That fucking thing went right over where I had been only a few minutes before, and you'll just have to imagine what that thing looked like when I was a mile closer to it before I turned off to go east. It scared the FUCK out of me. I got a short little video of it as it was dissipating, too. You can kind of see how strong the inflow winds were around me.

I sat there for a little bit trying to get oriented as to where I was I could accurately report later my location when I took those pictures. It turned out that I somehow made it over to W Avenue and 290th Street (this is more for my reference than yours). At that point I just kind of guessed that the show was over since Jeremy was saying some not-so-great things about how the storm looked on radar, not to mention that the thing was WAY north of me already since it was booking along so fucking fast and that it was getting dark outside. So I headed home, BUT...I saw the damn thing redevelop again right to my north! The wall cloud reformed, and I saw a debris cloud with a tiny funnel waaay off in the distance. It was probably just passing west of Ames at that point, but that's the last I saw of my first chasing tornado. The interesting thing was that the Colorado-ISU game was just about to kick off over at the football stadium, and they had to evacuate all the tailgaters and fans either into Jack Trice Stadium or Hilton Coliseum to shelter them as the storm passed. I think it might have even delayed kickoff. Actually, they did delay kickoff.

I guess the tornado went off to the northeast and might have actually touched down in Gilbert. It did hit part of Woodward when it was that monster thing initially, but I see from ooshiny's journal that there might have been damage elsewhere, too. I hope nobody was hurt.

Comments

[pupster.livejournal.com]

Wow.. that's awesome, those are some sweet pics.. kind of a scary deal but very fun at the same time, kind of like a huge adrenaline rush.