Dallas Center, IA Supercell and Local lightning
I'd spent the weekend up in Pine River, Minnesota at my grandfathers funeral, so I didn't chase any day of this busy weekend. Headed back to Omaha at noonish on Sunday. After stopping in Des Moines for dinner, my friend Chris Allington was texting me about a big storm west of Des Moines, we sent a bunch back and forth about where exactly it would be and such. So before I forget, thanks Chris for Nowcasting for this event. It was by no means a chase. The radio went off for a Tornado warning for Dallas County (the one we just drove into) and I started scanning the horizon. There were too many trees to see anything though. I wasn't very optimistic about seeing anything, but then I got a glimpse of a lowering to the WNW.
We pulled off at the next exit and were greeted with a very nice looking wall cloud. We were 8 miles south of Dallas Center, IA and apparently 4 minutes before this image there was a rainwrapped tornado reported on this cell. We were looking at the same location as the report, so the only thing I can think of that would have been reported as a tornado is on the far right side of the image, back behind the RFD (I'm assuming, didn't get a great look at different angles) or this intial lowering. If there isn't a tornado (well I'll never know for sure) that is a nice looking wall cloud. The radar looked very impressive, a very nice hook that redeveloped ahead of the old one.
Didn't stay long and I'm kicking myself now for not taking more stills. I took like 4 in the first minute then waited 5 minutes to take anymore, and by that time, whatever "tornado" there was, was now rainwrapped. That first image was at 20mm. This next one was only like 30 seconds later, at 10mm.
I really couldn't see much rotation and my family was with me so I just said it probably won't produce anything right here, we'd have to follow it a ways until it recycled. Then we left and didn't see any storms on the rest of the way back.
Back in Omaha now. I watched a few storms develop SW of town and got in the car and tried to get some CG's (something we have been very short of this year). I drove around for too long trying to find a spot where it wasn't raining. I think I did this from 11:20 until midnight then finally the initial development passed. I noticed a lot of activity to the SW. I went to my new favorite spot for storms coming in from the southwest, a bridge over interstate 80.
At this point I'm parked on a bridge over i80 on the wrong side hoping no one calls the cops, although I don't think I could really get in that much trouble for this, I just didn't want to deal with anything. Now the rain has stopped, or at least its really light.
Now I'm psyched as to what Might come next. I don't think I saw those three happen when they did, I was really glad It was correctly exposed. I planned to just sit here until a CG just nailed something a mile away, unfortunately that never happened.
now I'm zoomed out to about 14mm I think. Right down the center of the interstate! I got a few shots of some sweet bolts, but no cars on the interstate! lol I guess that would be the case at 1a.m.
This was a great shot. I had to keep stopping down the aperture the closer the bolts got to prevent them from blowing out. Around this time activity went downhill and I didn't get any more images that didn't have water drops on them. A fun little outing and a cool surprise supercell on the way home!
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