My Top 10 weather events of 2010

After turning the clock to 2011 today I thought I would go back and pick out my top 10 events I chase and/or documented this past year. I know I didn't have as an exciting year as others chasing wise and seeing alot of great tornadoes this year but I do think mine was rather exciting seeing my fair share of tornadoes and seeing alot of good events close to home or "on" my house for that matter.

We had a pretty good winter here with alot of good snow events and the good luck seemed to continue right on into spring seeing alot of great storms and tornadoes in the plains, bagging some tornadoes on the home turf and some good events back home in the late summer months. This was probably the best year I can remember for storms in northern IL that I have been apart of.

10. May 7th- early morning thunderstorms on my birthday. It looked like for a few days leading up to my birthday that there was going to be a pretty good chance of some rumblers during the morning hours so I was pretty excited. It was an hour past midnight and storms were moving in from the WSW and I was hoping they would be good enough to produce some descent lightning. And sure enough they did, giving me an early birthday present that morning. Also, videos take too long to upload on here so I'm just going to put up the youtube links for them.





9. January 8th- During the early morning hours an intense LES band making its way all the way inland to eastern Kane county producing the heaviest snowfall rate I have seen while living in Batavia, 1.1" in 20 minutes. I was watching this band for atleast 2 hours on radar hoping it would make it out here and when it got here, it poured snow!



http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/48/xka1GkhS-eE


8. August 4th- The 2 year anniversay of the 8/4/08 Derecho..turns out mother nature likes certain dates. An impressive line of storms marched eastward during the morning hours producing strong winds across the area as the shelf cloud itself was probably moving over 60mph as you will see in the video. Some people even thought it was a timelapse at first!



http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/9/_7_J9y0QBYo

7. August 13th- The day of the shelf in northern Dekalb and Kane county. A line of storms produced a pretty good shelf cloud moving at a pretty low speed that I was able to follow for a good two hours just sitting out on open country roads and enjoying mother nature at her best.





http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/7/TS_TxHiC3No

6. May 19th. Being able to see the Leedy, OK tornado from TCU to tornadogenesis was very cool. We were right on it from the beginning and only got closer and watched the tornado touchdown from under 1/2 mile way. I have a good video of tornadogenesis but want to make it a timelapse before I put it up.



Tornado!



5. April 6th- After a chase bust the day before in northern MO, I was asleep the next morning and around 7am, I heard something pounding the roof. I knew instantly it was hail, most likely from leftover storms the night before that went through IA. I quickly ran downstairs with my camera and shot a good video of quarter to occasional golf ball sized hail pounding our deck in the backyard. The biggest hail I've seen at my house! Besides a tornado warning at 6am this past November, the hail was a great alarm! Here is a radar image of the storm that did the damage..probably about 70% of the homes in my neighborhood got new roofs because of the hail.

71dbz core!



http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/29/yrJGzvBpl6U


4. January 1st/2nd- LES event in northwest IN/southwest MI. Went over to the LES belt to document a setup that was expected to produce large amounts of snow with impressive snowfall rates. Adam, Sam, and I left during the evening on the 1st of the year to run into +SN as we neared the MI border and were lead by a state trooper at 30mph with snow covered highways. We then spent the whole night out in the band getting under the heaviest part of it. The next morning we spent in a BK in Watervliet, MI where they had near a foot of snow on the ground and going in and out of +SN the entire afternoon.




I shot this video outside of the BK under an intense LES band.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/45/fjzbnFxYYRk


3. May 22nd- The famous Bowdle day without seeing the big monster tornado. We did see the first large tornado at a distance but thanks to power lines down on the road we had to go a good 30 minutes out of the way to get back into position only to end up a quarter mile north of a large rain wrapped tornado with baseball hail to our immediate north.






2. June 5th- Illinois tornadoes, This day was showing big potential for a few days along the warm front in IL with great mid-level support, instability, and lots of moisture. But...we were sitting in extreme southeast IA around 6pm socked under clouds with horrible low-level lapse rates and if someone would of told us we would see three great tornadoes before nightfall, the six of us wouldn't of believed it. We decided to drive back into IL through Burlington folling a descent shower that rapidly grew into a mini supercell and eventually putting down tornado after tornado for us from Yates City to Elmwood to just west of Peoria.

1st tornado

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/19/28Kjo5FJv34



It was like a scene out of twister...driving on a gravel road with a small valley and then a hill and so on, and then going down into a valley we saw a funnel and 10 seconds later getting to the top of the hill it was on the ground! It was amazing the amount of lightning near this tornado!

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/18/pVRzIRv8nos

2nd tornado



great structure!

3rd tornado on video

http://www.youtube.com/user/MrTORN80#p/u/16/1mKC2L0FFrw


1. May 18th- It came down to my #2 pick and this one but I picked this day because the longevity of the day as well as seeing three different supercells that produced four tornadoes. Our target area this day was Dalhart, TX and didn't have to go that far after that to see what ended up being my favorite chase day of the year. We saw an amazing structured supercell near Dumas, TX that produced two brief tornadoes before this image.



radar image at the time of the picture above



this storm went on to produce another tornado Stinnett but we left it before that and hauled back west to catch another monster of a supercell that ended up giving me my first night tornado, and it was a big one!



after this, we caught another supercell directly to the northwest of this one, as it too, produced another large tornado just west of Stratford.


Here is to 2011 being just as good or even better, filled with lots of photogenic tornadoes and thundersnow!


Matt