Home Photos By Year Severe Weather Data Information Winter Weather Links Contact About Aurora Joel's Forecast Page American Bald Eagle Info
7-24-09
Number 2 of my 4 short entries. This was a marginal chase setup, but it was a close enough target so we targeted the Dubuque area. Somewhat long story made very short, we intercepted a tornado warned cell near Bellvue, IA. We shot east on some back road, trying to get to a very notable notch that was evident on radar and also showed a nice couplet.
This storm was moving pretty fast and there was quite a bit of pesky anvil rain, which forced me to hand hold my shots. I believe this was ISO 400, 1/5s. Hard to get a crisp picture with those settings.
That area just to the right of that heavy rain shaft was our area of interest. I probably should have cropped the top of this shot seeing as how blown out it is.
Later on we learned this road we were shooting from was under 5 feet of water at one point. That would have sucked to run in to.
Almost let it overtake us here. There was a lot of rising motion into this now.
We stayed on it for probably another good hour/hour and a half after this, all the time watching it go to complete outflow dominant garbage. We give up and head home...through sheets and sheets of rain. It seemed to keep redeveloping directly over our heads all the way back home.
After arriving home, I decided to head out for lightning. As I sat on my favorite back road, I watched the skies light up with cloud to cloud lightning, but never anything visible. As I sat there taking pics, I started noticing a TON of power flashes. I have seen quite a few before, but nothing like this. It seemed to flash once every 45 seconds or so. Some were extremely bright too. Now I am sort of worrying. This back road is gravel and mud and surrounded by corn. I didn't want to get stuck out here. So, I head back. The only problem is the way back took me parallel with the storm, which almost hit me broadside. I finally beat it to the main road and get a bit ahead of it, all the while watching all these power flashes popping off. I pull into the Jewel parking lot and finally get a still. I've tried and tried in the past, but they have always been too faint. This one was extremely bright.
After sitting through a deluge and watching fair-goers run to their cars, I let it pass over and went back out to witness a fantastic light show. I didn't want to drive all the way back out to the middle of nowhere, so I set up in a HY-VEE parking lot. I'm doing fantastic at composing my shots lately, I know. From here all I would nab were anvil crawlers.
