This video does contain one swear.
It was the perfect end to a long weekend at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. I was attending the State Science Fair Exhibition in which my project received second place. I had checked the models a few days earlier, anticipating a nice hail storm to witness at the least. I have a fairly large passion for hail and my last experience was about two years ago. I practically ran out of the ceremony when my Blackberry RADAR had updated and I saw a nice cell forming to my Northwest. It was around 3:50pm when my good friend Erica called me informing me of the same cell that had recently gone Severe Thunderstorm warned for its hail. I started paying closer attention to the towers going up, but it took another five minutes of driving to spot the upper and outer bands of my storm.
I was growing with excitement by the minute! My sister began to throw a fit about her some technology function she was having, causing us to pull over and lose us precious time. Although now, I think her fit may have gifted me a tornado!
Around 4:15pm we started heading west on a road I can no longer recall. That is when I caught my first look of the monsters base!
I saw two downdraft areas (rain and hail) and figured the spot where I thought there would be a lowering. At 4:20pm we turned North onto Highway 356 and I had a farther lookout on this storm. I figured that this second downdraft I had seen may have been pulled along with the storms RFD (rear flank downdraft). The area I had chosen earlier now seemed to have a slight lowering. I couldn't tell for sure because my mom, now freaking out, refused to open the windows. Thinking back on it, I only saw one stroke of lightning!
Near 4:25pm I could now see a defined lowering and Erica was nowcasting me.
The storm was oddly enough running south easterly, parallel to the road I was traveling. My luck couldn't have been better! Within the following five minutes SCUD began to rotate around my lowering, which I could now classify a rotating wall cloud.
I had a strong feeling that this storm could produce soon. I tried calling it in to the NWS (National Weather Service) but oddly enough, no one answered the phone. Thank god there was a SKYWARN spotter that had seen the same thing further north and was able to call it in. I would estimate that the wall cloud was about ten miles to my NNE when I got the news it had gone tornado warned.
At 4:36pm a funnel started to descend horizontally from the wall cloud and that's when I started filming. It took my breath away and I could not shut up. My mom was no longer able to take anything I said into account and started spazzing out. This was probably triggered when I told Erica,"This thing is really wrapping up. It looks to be...an elephant trunk tornado!" Within the next few minutes, you can hear the havoc in the car when I was leaning across the seat, because my sister was unwilling to trade position in fear of not being able to watch her movie. You know when out of nowhere your seat belt suddenly chooses to strangle you and the only thing you can do is rebuckle it? While I had the unfortunate luck of that happening and my mom concerned for my safety would not stop screaming at me although I had buckled up long before she stopped yelling. My mom had refused to pull over from the beginning, leaving me without the crucial knowledge of of which direction this rapidly descending funnel was moving in. According to my mom moving north as fast as the speed limit allows of a south easterly moving storm would lead us out of danger. That would've worked (and thank God it did) if we weren't south of this storm. I then started to grow concerned realizing we were about 2 miles from the funnel that could possibly drop down right on top of our car.
4:39PM on May 7th, 2011 was the most amazing moment of my life as I watched a little ball of dust and soot be thrown into the air by my beautiful, silver-gray, horizontal, elephant trunk tornado. It had touched down in Rantoul, IL just SW of where two highways intersected.
Soon after I called Brandi to try and get a hold of a different NWS telephone number. At this point the rotation and funnel (the tornado had lifted) could only be seen out of the sunroof of the minivan. I lost visual of it within the minute. I called my friends that were down the highway further south of me and tried to figure where they were. That was the scariest part of my experience. I had now lost all visual site of the funnel/tornado! As soon as the phone connected to Cara, my friend, she told me they had just entered some heavy rain and hail. WHAT A RELIEF. I could see the downdraft she was in from the rear window and saw there was enough space where they would not enter the rotation.
This concludes my first (and hopefully not last) tornado.
