August 12, 2010: I had stayed up the previous night till 6am watching perseid meteors, but woke up to an email from Mike about the days potential in western Minnesota. Well after not taking his advice on June 16 (Dupree) figured I should go this time. Only two hours to the SD border anyways! Racing west on 212 I finally get a view of the storm at Dawson. I got north on past Bellingham and see a shower from the south is about to rain on the updraft of the main storm, nearly produced here. Thinking the southern showers base would become the new storm, I got south back to Bellingham till I was out of the rain. Got west a mile and I run into Mike. Pretty nice wide flat base with a wall cloud.
Really wrapped up nicely here and I thought we were set for a nice tornado. Saw 3 funnels from this location and some of the craziest rotation I've seen.
Here's a video capture of the first funnel.
Shortly after this we noticed leaves falling from the sky, leading us to believe that one of the funnels had touched down. Motion was something else, haven't seen such fast rotation since May 19th, or maybe May 10th. A little powerline love...
Let it pass us overhead and apparently it ripped off a porch roof 1 mile to our east in that town. Waited for it to pass the town (try to avoid driving into tornadoes) and got back east and south 3 miles to my next east paved highway (or so I thought), it was gravel for 5 miles, then I hit hwy 119 11 miles later. As I was getting back north I missed a cone tornado when I had rain in the way of the storm... figures, still haven't seen photos of it yet though.
Now 2 miles south of Appleton, crazy green barrel of an updraft and wall cloud under it. Thing gets spinning good again after eating another storm.
Vorticies touch the ground multiple times about 2 minutes after the above shot. Here's are some video captures.
A bit of a wider look with a still...
Biggest tease of a storm I've ever seen, if It didn't have to eat the storms ahead of it I have no doubt we would have had a large tornado lasting at least a few minutes. OH well still a fun day and got some awesome video of rotation... (make sure you watch in HD)
