Funnel near Iowa City

Chase Recap:

My first long distance solo chase of the season and it was nice to get out on my own. After the photogenic tornadoes in Iowa on July 6th, it was hard to ignore a possible setup a week later on a Saturday.

So, like an idiot, I set out Friday after work for Iowa, staying in Kansas City on Friday night. After an early breakfast, I hit the road north for Des Moines.

CAPE was looking better further east in Iowa along I-80 and south of I-80. Visible satellite was showing some agitated CU along the differential heating boundary and southern Iowa had cleared out pretty well.

I headed east to Iowa City where I met up with some other chasers.

I was going to make a push west towards the storms near Des Moines as they were clearly showing the better tops and updrafts. Once we got onto I-80 west we decided quickly that the wall cloud and updrafts to the storms going up right by us were quite spectacular and we stuck with them for the afternoon.

At first there were two distinct updrafts and wall clouds and we positioned between them. It seemed like the first storm to the east had some cold outflow which kept messing with the inflow of the storm to the west. Nonetheless, the western Wall Cloud looked the best and looked like it might produce a few times.

I followed the storm all the way through Iowa City to the east of town before driving right under the wall cloud and realizing that it was being undercut by cold air.

I headed through West Liberty before eventually giving up and heading back west to meet up with Adam and Alec. Just after going through West Liberty I saw a quick funnel cloud. I wasn’t even sure of what I had saw at first, but it turned out others had captured it as well.