June 20th, 2007: Twin Cities, MN area


Here's a video of 3 time lapses. Fisrt supercell from afar, second is weaking rotating area, third is scud tumbleweeds. 53 Seconds. Video Link (2.6 M). Be patient on download speed.

This much action was not expected in the area today. I left home at 4 PM after a few supercells went up to the north of here. I drove to Coon Rapids in rush hour traffic spotting this cell, which had a small brief lowering:







It became evident that going west to the cell that started around St Cloud was the way to go. The anvil was already far over my area. The problem was getting there in rush hour again. Eventually I broke free but wasn't able to catch the cell due to rivers and lakes causing indirect routes.



I ran into David Drufke and we continued after this cell down to the New Prague area. At that point we split up and I headed due west to catch a new cell coming in from the NW. I managed to go right into some golf ball size hail that I'm sure gave my car a new dent or two.

Oops!


I entered a town, probably New Prague, where large rolling scud on the ground was occuring. Not to far away from it was a small weakly rotating area at the clould base.





While looking at this I managed to miss more rolling scud starting behind me below what loked to be a new updraft:



I parked a few miles south of town and took these:

I the headed east to I35 for gas, and then south to Fairibult to get in front of the next storm. Parked at a lake where Bill Doms also happened to be, watching lightning and some great sunset lit towers:





From there it was more rain and hail heading west. When I was finally out of the rain for good, it was time to start the lightning experiment. It's really hard to get lightning in focus, and a DSLR doesn't make it much easier. Of the 30 or so shots, only these were in focus:







Headed west to St Peter and thenup 169 to home. Arrived home around 12:30 AM.

Miles: 200?
New Hail Dents: 1 hood whopper + many more

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- Tony Perkins