As the storm started approaching the Illinois border, we repositioned further south since we were too far north of the long-track supercell. Our new target city was Jerseyville, IL. Did a quick fuel up and waited for a while yet again. For about 15 minutes just before the storm moved into the county Jerseyville is in, the tornado warning was downgraded to a severe thunderstorm warning. At this time, we started to head east out of Jerseyville to get a better look of the storm. I knew the storm was likely just cycling, and to NOT punch the core. Sure enough, when we were about 5 or 6 miles east of Jerseyville the tornado warning went out.
This is when things start going to hell. I could see where the supercell was and was paying attention to an area just north of Jerseyville where I thought I saw a funnel cloud. Sure enough on our video, there MAY have been a funnel. It was quite close to the ground! Mind you, it was very hard to tell since it was after dark at this time. At the same time of seeing this, our data capability dropped out completely. This is only 1 of 2 times i've run into such an issue and for over an hour we had no data AT ALL. Had we had data, I would have seen the amazing hook echo this storm was exhibiting! You can see the picture below...looks like Pacman heading towards me to eat me.
Here is where our first "Uh Oh" could have happened. We were headed east at this point, with absolutely no data and no idea what the storm looked like. I knew this thing was capable of producing a tornado, but we lost track of where it went. We took Rt. 111 north about 1 mile where you see Medora, IL above. We stayed there for about 15 or 20 minutes trying to figure out where the storm was, not realizing we put ourselves in the path of the very pronounced hook echo. Wes Carter, a fellow storm chaser at Stormtrack text messaged me at this point, asking me if everything was alright. From there on, him and Rocky Watson were our "nowcasters", guiding us where to go.Continuing on east bound after we had "nowcasters" helping us, we arrived at Shipman, IL and headed north towards Carlinville, IL. At this point it was after 9pm. We were about 3 miles south of Carlinville, when the NWS issued new tornado warnings for the area. Nothing too interesting on video, although we did catch a wall cloud and possibly another funnel cloud. Again though, it was way too dark to figure out what was in front of us. No data STILL at this point, so we started heading into Carlinville, then eastward again towards I-55
When we got to I-55, Rocky called and instructed us a tornado warned storm was heading right for Litchfield, with Litchfield only being about 8 miles to our south. We arrived in town around 11:30pm and went just west of town to watch what was coming in. At this time, a brand new warning was issued, stating a possible tornado was located NEAR Litchfield heading east at 45mph. At the same time, our video caught another possible funnel cloud nearly on top of us. Soon after, we got the hell out of dodge and started heading eastbound at high speed, attempting to get out from the "bear's cage". While driving through Litchfield, we immediately could tell we were underneath the circulation as the wind shifted direction constantly and suddenly (kind of hard to tell on video). It was soon after this point when Rocky took another screen shot from GRLevel3 where the couplet had just passed over us. On our video, you can see the wall cloud right above us that we were fighting to get away from. This was a very precarious situation to be in! Had something touched down, we would have been VERY close to it, if not on top of us.
You can see in the picture above how close we were, even after the circulation went past us. Our car icon is where we were at at that exact time right behind the mesocyclone marker in Irving, IL. As we passed through Hillsboro, IL there were unconfirmed reports of a couple tornado touchdowns from a news station in the area. We didn't see anything...but I wouldn't be surprised if there was something there.It was soon after this point we broke off our chase. One, the storms began to die down to below tornado warned status and it was 1am. We were exhausted at this point!
We learned a lot from this chase. Its hard to spot features at night and lightning is your best friend. For now on...we'll have our CB radio with us, in case we run into data holes. It has weather radio built in, so we can have a general idea where the storms are at. I think this coming winter we'll be investing in a cell amplifier too!
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