Secor, IL tornado

The only thing that I could add would be to tighten up the contrast in Photoshop.

This photo seems to be drawing a lot of comments even without a

request for critique, so, well, why not request.

I've had several people ask for the story behind it. Since most

people seeing it here probably aren't interested in the details behind

how we got here, I'll put in some hilights. However, please rate the

photo, not the story.

this was the day of the Indianapolis 500, and I live in Indy. A good

day to be out of town. We knew there were going to be several

tornados, including some very close to home. But we also knew that it

would be too humid to see them close to home. So, we decided to chase

in west-central IL.

We got a little sidetracked by early tornados behind us that surprised

us, wasted some time on storms north of us, then finally settled back

down on our original plan.

We targeted this storm entirely visually - we had stopped to look at

radar data, and there were just so many interesting storms we couldn't

decide. Then, I saw the top of the tower on this storm, and figured

it was forming on the outflow boundary of a colapsing one. It wasn't

raining yet, thus not on radar, and was approximately 40 miles away.

We followed the entire life cycle of this tornaod, from that tower,

through several rotating mesos & wall clouds, to a tornado with no

visible funnel (debris cloud on the groun, meso above, but no funnel -

most common tornado form in my area). Then the funnel formed from top

and bottom to middle. We were approximately .75 miles from it at this

point.

We wanted to get closer, as we were in perfect viewing position and

there were several good escape route options, but there was a

slow-moving fire truck in the way blocking the road. Also almost got

run over by an idiot passing in the ditch - probably a Piotrowski

wanabe. Anyway, the tornado was moving about 35mph northeast, and we

were limited to about 20 mph east and north at right angles by the

fire truck. Thus, this photo was taken early in the weakening phase

of the storm, from about 2.25 miles.

We were woried it would hit the town of Secor, IL. Thankfully it

"roped out" before getting to the town, and only destroyed a barn. It

was a fairly strong tornado, probably would have been an F3 if it had

struck the town. Thankfully it was an F1, as it stayed in rural

areas. Sadly it did strike and destroy a barn (hence the F1, rather

than F0 rating - and the barn in the photo survived - it was north of

that barn).

Shortly after this we nearly drowned as we tried to backtrack to a

different storm and got caught by the squall line coming through as we

were refueling, then couldn't drive fast enough to catch anything else.

Returned home to a city that had had several tornados affect it, and

helped with communications at one of the red cross shelters. We knew

we were taking a risk driving 400 miles away from home on a day we

knew home would get hammered. But it paid off, because we saw our

tornado, and could watch it without getting wet or hailed on, which

would not have been possible at home.