June 3 2008 Southwest Illinois

This looked like a much more potent day early on that it wound up being. A bow echo marched across central Illinois during the morning hours clearing the state by about noon. It left behind a very pronounced outflow boundary, with a very unstable airmass to it's south. I spent most of the morning at WILL helping Ed Kieser with the warnings from the bow echo, but soon made my way back home to get ready for the chase. At about 2:00 I headed down Interstate 72 for the Jacksonville area to adjust from there. Once reaching Jacksonville, I found no compelling reason to move. I had a good south or west option so I parked it for a bit. Using spotter network I could see Mark Sefried, Scott Kampas and Darin Kaiser approaching my location. They set up shop at the gas station parking lot with me, and we were soon joined by Brad Emel. We joked around about how the day had no chance for probably 2 hours. The surface flow was terrible with hardly a gentle breeze. Little cells popped up and died off all around us with nothing really to get excited about. One storm finally caught our eye down near Pike County, IL so we started heading south. En route to that storm we saw another little storm going up ahead of it, so we decided to take a look at it first. The storm looked pitiful on radar, but had a nice base visually. I'll take visual appearance over radar any day, so we pulled off and started watching. Wasn't long before a huge chunk of scud slowly rose up into the base. We joked again about how our little storm was trying to form a wall cloud, but soon we had an "ass draggin" wall cloud churning away with good rising motion on the leading edge. Hmmm, we thought, I think we have a nice little minisupercell. We decided to reposition a bit closer away from the tree line (which with such a low wall cloud made it seem like we had a wedge already). Almost immediately after stopping a little vortex touched down under the wall cloud. We had a tornado! Wasn't down long, but enough to get us to stop and get out the cameras. Shortly after it touched back down again, for much longer. It started as a little windy vortex, but matured into a nice cone tornado that lasted a couple minutes. With slow storm motions we figured we could get much closer so we repositioned even further north right next to the huge wall cloud. Another tree line blocked our view, and it appeared we had contact with the ground again so Brad and I decided we wanted to get right up next to it. We emerged about a mile away from the pitiful tornado. This thing was rotating just barely fast enough to be an actual tornado and not just a big cloud touching the ground. Can't say it wasn't fun to watch though! I thought I could get even closer as you could almost ride a bike through the weak tornado, but as soon as I started rolling again it "roped out". A new supercell had gone up to our southwest in the same location as the first, and had a much better radar appearance so we dropped down quickly to intercept. On tree separate occaisions I thought I was following Brad's car, but was really behind a separate similar car so I fell behind quite a bit. Either way, I finally emerged ahead of the beautiful storm base and pulled off to take some photos near Carollton. After staying with the storm for about a half hour, things appeared to be weakening and dark was falling. Mark and I were heading to Nebraska in the morning so we called it off and headed back home. I still can't believe we got a tornado with 5 mph surface winds. Just goes to show how far an outflow boundary can get you sometimes.

Darin Kaiser and Mark Sefried looking at our pathetic attempts at convection.

The autoclub. Chase vehicles from right to left... Brad Emel, myself and Mark Sefried.

Our little minisupercell with full fledged wall cloud now.

Good sized wall cloud on it now. Time to get closer.

Wedge? No, ass dragging wall cloud.

Wall cloud shortly after the first brief touch down occured.

Back down again! This is about what the first touch down looked like, just a little vortex condensing for about 15 seconds.

This one was a little more serious. Nice cone condensing now near Manchester, IL!

This is why we chase! I can't believe this happened with such weak surface winds.

Tornado wrapping up now. It actually condensed down again briefly while we were in the process of doing our three car chorus line of three point turns.

Right up by the wall cloud now. Had little vorticies floating around under there behind the tree line.

This was the biggest joke of a tornado I've ever seen, but a tornado no less. It was rotating decently at the cloud base, but down below you could probably walk through the surface circulation.

Second supercell now near Carrollton, IL.