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Thunderstorm over Buffalo Lake

Unfortunately, the storms kept dying, and we kept hopping southeast from storm to storm waiting for one to take off. Of course, right as we are getting back into the metro loop, a storm near Albertsville (where we started) takes root and puts down a tornado.  Eventually made our way to a storm in Eden Prairie.  It went tornado warned right over Hennepin County. It took quite the search of the southern side of this larger, semi-split storm to find the updraft.  We eventually found a really odd skinny updraft quite a ways away from the precipitation.  I wasn’t even sure if it was the updraft of the Eden Prairie storm, or just a little flanking line storm that wasn’t on radar. Eventually, when we got close enough and stopped driving, it became apparently that this skinny little updraft was rotating quite a bit. It had very brief skinny funnels, but of more interest was the rounded base it was developing over Edina. The is one of those storms that produces crazy color. This storm made everything a greenish yellow, similar to the color of a tungsten light bulb.

It seemed to fall apart as it moved further north, but as soon as we got into heavy traffic with no place to stop, it produced a more “serious” funnel off the southwest corner of the base. I’m not sure if it’s the same funnel that people saw “over Lake Calhoun”, but I though we were going to have a bad situation with a tornado touchdown in the metro. Fortunately, the funnel fell apart after a few minutes and the whole updraft seem to being following it’s lead. We continued to follow up up to Minneapolis, where is seemed to be dying in the setting sun.

UPDATE:  A MPX NWS survey confirmed this as an EF-1 Tornado.

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It was a very cool storm, but probably not worth a 700 mile drive. We arrived a little late to the party, as the storm had already produced in Nebraska, and was now a rain-wrapped HP mess on the north end of a developing line. It was impressive on radar, as it appeared to have powerful, but wide rotation, and resembled a coma shaped hurricane with an eye. It was too dangerous to get into to verify, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a tornado in the core of that storm. It had very powerful inflow at all times, on both the north, south, and east side of the storm. That’s something I hadn’t really experienced before. Usually that super strong inflow is replaced by RFD at some point, but this storm had powerful winds feeding into it from every side of the storm that we were on.

Technical issues made this a challenge, as our bluetooth GPS seems to no longer like our computer. Data and roads were surprisingly good and kept us from getting munched by this storm during the extra time it took to figure out navigation, but if we used spotter network, I’m sure quite a few people would have been nervous given our positions a few times. These pictures are from our initial intercept from the top of a large hill east of Underwood, Iowa.

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I photographed way more wildlife than storms this day. We didn’t have time to get out to the triple point, so we played the warm front, but I don’t think there was quite enough instability, and definitely not enough of a cap to let it build up. This was from Leola, South Dakota.

Here’s the video in HD.
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We randomly ran into our normal chase partner Bill Doms, who was already on the storm.  Our tornado warned target storm didn’t produce in our presence, but a storm to it’s south gave us a funnel cloud and two tornadoes before nightfall.

We have good video for once, which should be up later in the week.

I decided to head down to the MO/IL state line on Wednesday for a possible tornado outbreak. Jacob, Doug, and I headed out a 6am for Hannibal, MO. We were expect an event in IL, but ended up in north central MO. After watching early convention struggle initially, we eventually noticed three cells on satellite that seemed to be dominating their local environment about an hour to our west. We decided there were our cells and set out with an intercept point north of Kirksville, MO. As we approached the towering cells, two of the cells went tornado warned and a tornado was reported south west of our target. We had our choice between the two tornado warned cells as we approached from the east, but we were able to see a wall cloud on the northern cell, and head for it. We skirted just north of a new cell that was forming, avoiding its core, and headed just north of the town of Kirksville in a clearing. We saw rotating rain bands underneath the wall cloud a mile or two to our WSW. As it approached, we could see a fairly large cone tornado surrounded by sheets of rain. It was headed in our direction, so we made our escape plans, and were just about to head for a safer spot as it approached within a mile, but then it took a more east-southeastly path at the last minute, and we were able to watch as it entered the town of Kirksville, MO.

The tornado lifted, and apparently reformed/dropped east of Kirksville. We crossed a damage path several times, but were unable to see the tornado again. We were able to stay out of the rain and hail core with was mighty impressive to our east.

UPDATED PRELIMINARY TORNADO DAMAGE SURVEY RESULTS FROM MAY 13
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