July 31st, 2008 Chase MN/IA

Round 1 - AM MN Bow Echo/Derecho

The day started a little after 4am when the Storm Prediction Center issued a severe thunderstorm watch for the ongoing bow echo/derecho. I hit the snooze button, the fired up Nexrad, went back to sleep. The first severe warning that registered was for a one county West a little after 6am. I fired up Nexrad and watched, got up, packed for work, watched some more, a tornado warning for a book end vortex on the northern extent of the bow structure was issued around 7:30 (will look up exact times later), followed by the Southern extent maybe an hour later. I listened to the active Skywarn net’s on the way to work. A roll cloud presented itself that spanned the horizon, quite nice, I hit a 7 story parking structure, when I went in on the bottom it was perfectly rounded shaped, by the time I reached the top overlooking Normandale Lake it had stopped rolling and was ragged and shelfy disappearing into the horizon. Anyhow the bow echo graduated to a derecho and petered out just inside of Indiana.

Round 2 - PM Iowa

I left work at 4:30 it’s a bit difficult to escape the confines of the city any later stopping at home for 10 minutes, I headed for Iowa via Albert Lea to Austin (’SPAM Town USA’ not the e-mail kind, home of the Spam Museum long story but, over the weekend a few of us had a Spam craving, someone had mentioned it just in the last month or this past weekend), to the Waverly, IA area and points West. Some nice towering cumulus in the distance at times but, they had difficulties getting going. MD #1982 was issued just as I was approaching the now stationary boundary, no watch was ever issued. Met up with Rich Gudmunsen, Randy Nelson, and Dean Barron via Radio then stalked and met Tim Purington for the first time in person and Andy Gabrilson who I might have met before. Anyways some regular cycling of the same few systems occurred I was able to get a look at the 3 that were trying but, just a bit too capped. Between cells I took a bunch of photos of Alison, IA my daughters name (but, they spelled it wrong with 2 L’s, no matter, Photoshop, I can fix it). I took photos of the Alison welcome sign, Alison water tower, Alison post office, Alison hardware store, etc. I have not had the opportunity to go through photos video yet except for the sunset!

Last chase of July 2008. On a slightly downer note I passed by the Owatonna airport where a private jet had crashed shortly after the morning’s storm had gone thru. 8 people lost their lives. While I did’nt stop quite a few news crews and vehicles were parked at the airport on the way down, on the way back I could have sworn thier was stadium lighting around a section of corn field on the other side of I-35 (maybe it was a stadium?).

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