I haven't even finished editing material from my Friday outing but this one is hot so I'll just come back to that later. Without a doubt this has been a very intense and in many respects, devastating day for the Central IL region. Several tornado producing supercells developed Saturday evening and tracked across the state. A cell that blew up at Galesburg and chewed a path down through the heart of Peoria was the worst of the batch. Other cells to the SW of Chicago were equally damaging in and around the Kankakee area. To the SW of the Galesburg/Peoria storm, new development became warned in Tazewell county and tracked SE into Logan and then Dewitt. The timing was terrible in that I had to work but thankfully my coworker allowed me about 30 extra minutes so to monitor the arrival. In spite of viewing lowerings and other ominous features, I was not able to confirm what I was seeing to make a report. The storm was already tornado warned so there wasn't much I would have been able to add from my vantage point anyways. The cell came close enough to Macon county that a storm based warning extended into ours however, the storm coincidentally collapsed at the very last minute that I needed to bail for work.
Radar capture of the beast near Peoria.
The lightning was constant, here I was pointed NE trying to get crawlers under the anvil.
Now facing NNW at the approaching storm (which I didn't save a radar capture for unfortunately), I chose settings that would compensate for the brilliance of the lightning but made everything else dark. I wish I would have used a slightly higher ISO and maybe 10 second exposure versus 8. Light editing has been applied to most of these images.
With the main area of rotation very close, I was hoping for what happened above to do it here so to light up the feature but it didn't. This scene has been lightened significantly however, doing so reveals a distinct funnel cloud that would've been in the vicinity of the Dewitt/Macon county border. I couldn't really see to verify if there may have been something on the ground or not so again, I left it unreported.
Thoughts are with those who suffered unfortunate loss. It goes without saying that this will be a major media event for the next few days. I'll post updates as more information comes available.
