When I took my lunch break on Friday, June 25, I noticed right away how hot and muggy it was. I checked the models one last time after lunch, and made the “go” decision to chase. EXWX chaser Marcus Hicks and I left Sioux Falls at about 3pm, and set our initial target as Brookings, SD. En route to Brookings, we quickly learned that the dryline was moving eastward more quickly than we thought. We reset our target to Marshall, MN, and began trying to play catch up.

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After a couple hours of trying to beat the storms east, we finally settled on a cell just east of Marshall. This cell was really getting its act together, or so it seemed:

The cell had a nice (although high-based wall cloud). After observing this cell for about 40 minutes, we concluded that the cell was becoming embedded in the line and wasn’t really viable. We made a difficult decision to core-punch a storm that was approaching from our south. This storm was not organized yet, but it showed potential. I decided to take my chances, punch the core, and get a good view of the cell. After a half hour of blinding rain and small hail, we popped out of the precip core. What a view we were treated to:

Rotation quickly tightened, and in about 10 minutes we had a brief spinup:

In a few short minutes we had a full fledged tornado:

The tornado was briefly a weak wedge, then it moved back to creating brief spin-ups:

As the tornado dissipated, we frantically began uploading our footage to our media broker, Black Cloud Media. There were no chasers in sight, and we knew that we were quite possibly the only chase team to document this tornado. We later found out that we were the only people to view this twister – and because of this our footage was purchased by The Weater Channel, CNN, and NBC. This was our first successful media buy!

Overall, I had a great time on this chase. I’m glad I followed my instinct and punched to get to the younger storm – it paid off! This was probably my last tornado of 2010, and it was a solid end to a great season.

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Why we Chase

Tornadoes are nature’s most violent phenomenon with winds at over 250mph, causing massive property damage, injury and ocassionally death.

There isn’t a known method to prevent tornadoes, so the best we can do is warn people. When we see dangerous weather, we report what we see to the NWS through Spotter Network. Although we’ll never know for sure, our hope is that our report may have saved lives.

There are few chasers this far north, and many times on this storm we were the only chasers in our area. We hope to provide valuable real-time information to help warn people of the danger they face imminently.