June 21, 2009 Central Iowa Funnels and Tornadoes

Quick write up as I'm tired of messing with accounts now. Mostly video captures on here. Saw this pretty sweet funnel east of Williams Iowa. Had some helical vortices spinning off it at times. This formed as the northeast lead cell of the pair lost its tornado warning(this storm) and the one to its southwest got its tornado warning issued. Just after that a bit. You could see the sw storm from here anyway, so there didn't appear to be a huge reason to drop this storm yet.

Fast-forward a good bit of driving in the rain on the north side of these storms. I drop south to Cleves and see this evidently tornado to the west.

Rotation was quite slow.

Fast-forward a bit again, I'm now west of Holland IA a few miles, digging around in a rain-wrapped occluded mess. This slowly rotating bowl formed with wrapping rain curtains. I'm moving back east in the above, filming out my back window as I thought it was about to condense down all the way. The structure leading up to this had a classic curling rfd into the bowl shaped deal at the back, the above.

I pull over for a bit and film the flying rain bands, but then have to move east again.

From video I've seen it appears this too was a tornado at times, with some flying debris. The rain bands flying around made it appear at least potentially tornadic. Who knows, it is what it is/was...not terribly important what it's called now. You can see the tip of that bowl deal at the top of the image.

Stills don't do much for this, it was just cool to watch the edge of the rain bands move east down the highway. NWS calls it a tornado through here, fwiw.

Still spinning around in there, with a chunk of debris of some sort above that taller tree on the left. That eventually lands in the field north/right of the highway.

Fast-forward a lot more to 1-2 a.m. near Walnut IA and the very cool at night wind farms. I need a faster wide angle lens. Had to use 1600 ISO on these for about a minute. The Milky Way was quite bright. Add in a storm(center) and a sea of in unison blinking red lights and you have a rather cool scene.

Wider angle lens now and a few lightning bugs joining the scene, as well as more storms. I drove myself batty driving in squares around these gravel grids looking for a better view. Most of these appear to have locked gates on the roads to them. It's very hilly here, so finding a good view without powerlines, close to a windmill, with most of the windmills in the shot, and having the storms in the shot too.....wasn't really easy. It should be, but probably 50 miles of me going down every option(at least once) between Walnut and Avoca says it is not. Got home around 4 a.m.