June 28, 2025

This was my second day tagging along with ICECHIP, the largest scientific field campaign to study and collect large hail. Terrence Cook was making a documentary and I had been invited along to play a part in it. I awoke in the middle of North Dakota where I had been van camping after the previous day's chase. I made my way down to 94, grabbed a shower at a Love's truck stop so I'd look presentable on camera, and then made my way east toward the day's target area.

Crews were slowly converging on the northeast SD/MN border. I arrived early and spotted a couple ICECHIP vehicles moving through town, but wound up napping in the back of the van under the shade of a tree waiting for the days' activities to get started.

I finally met up with Terrence and we got word of where the "COW" was setting up, the C-Band Doppler on Wheels. We caught up with them, pulled off on the side of a rural highway.

The COW's radar is so big that it has to be assembled at each deployment site. The truck has its own crane to hoist up the large dish.

Terrence and I shot video and stills as the crew assembled the radar, which took an hour or two.

The assembly crew finished and left just as the radar operator team arrived, a completely different group. We chatted with them for a bit and then left to meet up with another ICECHIP team.

A cell fired to the southwest, what I thought would be our intercept storm, but it was moving out of ICECHIP's target area.

We met up with a group from Northern in a small town that was prepping to launch a weather balloon. The radiosonde would give a live sampling of the atmospheric column and the day's storm environment.

The balloon is prepared in a ltitle tent where it's sheltered from the wind and contained before release. Curious neighbors stopped by to see what we were up to.

The balloon was launched and the team showed the readings coming in live from the radiosonde, the temperature profiles filling in on the skew-t in real time.

Group shot with the student team from NIU.

A monster supercell went up to our south and tornado reports started coming in. ICECHIP decided to play some much less impressive storms to the north, mainly because they had to depart from Fargo the next day, and didn't want to get drawn too far south. Terrence asked if I wanted to leave to go chase, but I said we should finish what we came here for, and I wasn't sure we'd even make it down to the storm in time for the tornadoes anyway. We went north to track down and interview Victor Gensini, who was running the show, and also met up with his student Katie Wargowsky. ICECHIP had an incredibly succesful field campaign, and this was the very last day, so I thought everyone would be in a celebratory mood. But folks were visibily disappointed that they weren't on the storm to the south that was putting on an epic tornado show, not to mention dropping some big hail. We chatted on and off camera for a bit and then split, the ICECHIP crews going north to start heading home, and Terrence and I splitting to chase on our own.

I didn't realize how far the storm had gotten away from me, and it was a two hour drive to get into an intercept position on it, which would put me in after dark. Meanwhile the atmosphere was exploding with additional cells that started interfering with each other and congealing. By the time I was approaching the original tornado producing storm, it had basically merged into a large tornado warned MCS. Darkness fell as I came in from the north, maneuvering for a core punch. Driving south through the heaviest part of the forward flank, and in the dark no less, was a futile, desperate, and stupid gesture. I didn't really care. I clawed my way through the driving rain, having to slow down to a crawl for a a couple minutes during the most intense precipitation. I finally emerged out of the core on the south side of what was now a training line of supercells. Lightning flashed and the only thing left by this point was a whale's mouth that spanned from horizon to horizon. As expected, the show was long over, every other chaser probably leaving hours ago to get dinner and rooms. I called the chase pretty much right there and van camped on the access road to a wind turbine.

More whale's mouth skies as showers and thunderstorms continued to move through the next morning: