Tuesday, featured another chase day that held some true promise even with an ugly positive-tilt trough pushing through the Midwest. But hey can you really give up on a warm front in the Midwest in April? Well, probably not if you had a day-off from work! My plan for the day was target the warm front/triple point northeast of Des Moines, IA where it seemed had the best supercell/tornadic promise. For the life of me I wasn't going to play a southern target with southwesterly winds at the surface...yuk! So, I found the area with the greatest tornado potential on this day west of Cedar Rapids, IA which would hang on to some southeasterly-to-southerly winds a tad bit longer through the day and wait for convective initiation along the warm front. This was quite a warm front (55°F in Waterloo, IA while maybe an hour to the south in Cedar Rapids, IA it was 80°F). By late-afternoon, the tornado potential seemed like it was decreasing as each storm went up and struggled to latch on to the boundary (warm front). With that being said, I remained patient which is new to me. Usually, I jump right on whatever goes up, but the trick is to make a confident decision with all the information at your disposal and stick with it. Due to the fact today's storm speeds were crappy to put it mildly you had to keep in the back of your mind if you jump on a storm you better have a hell of a good reason or you'll be out of position so quick when that storm does become the "right" storm to chase. As a tornado-warned cell to the southwest approached my location west of Cedar Rapids, IA (near Newhall, IA)...I figured it had the best tornado potential in my location. On a day like today you have to time it perfectly. What I mean by that: (basically guess within a few miles where it has got the best shot to produce a tornado and be there). Why? Well, once the storm passes you by you are very unlikely to catch it again. On a day like this you play more of a storm spotter role than a role of a storm chaser unfortunately. In general, fast storm speeds make chasing in April much more difficult than in May or specifically June when the jet energy isn't as strong. It would turn out that a few funnel cloud reports would later be reported 10 minutes after the supercell passed by me to the northeast. I tend to be skeptical of these reports however, as I observed a lot of turbulent scud with the low cloud bases that could be easily confused with a funnel cloud especially since this supercell appeared more outflow dominate than anything. Anyhow, I've added a few photos from the day below, but not as many as I'm accustomed to since this storm was not very photogenic:
I took this time to test out my Canon telephoto-zoom
lens as convection began to build
Cap slowly weakening along the warm front
Supercell moving northeast at 50mph approaching
the north-side of Cedar Rapids, IA
the north-side of Cedar Rapids, IA
In conclusion, the day had good potential, but the storms didn't cooperate and ride the boundary that myself and many storm chasers were hoping for. Their are more chases down the road however and hopefully May and June will make up for the disappointment over the last few days...
