The evening started out with rapid storm development to the
west of Mankato in southern Minnesota with several reports of large hail and
strong winds as the storms slowly tracked east toward the I-35 corridor. Amanda and I had just returned home from work
for the day and quickly moved to head down I-35 south to intercept the eastward
moving cells near Medford.
As we finally got ahead of the main cell just west of
Medford MN it had a very nice inflow feeder band rapidly streaming up into it
with a well pronounced Shelf Cloud also evident on the leading edge.
The storm rapidly was moving east toward our position but
did not display to significant damaging winds on radar.
Here the leading edge of the gust front finally overtook us
with measured wind speeds on the now all outflow dominate storm of 42MPH.
The burst of strong gusty winds scared up a flock of
songbirds from the nearby tree grove just as other chasers raced by to the
east.
This was a fun little mini chase and nice back to back
follow up to the previous days highly successful chase with the Brooten tornado
in Pope county MN
