Day 7. Monday 6/13/2005. Southern Iowa.

Today was predicted to be a serious outbreak by everyone, including the Storm Prediction Center. They actually had most of east Kansas, all of Iowa, all of Missouri, most of Illinois and part of South Dakota and Minnesota in Tornado Watch boxes for the day. I’ve never seen such widespread of a warning and neither has our experienced guides!

We headed up to Iowa and hung out about 45 miles south of Des Moines for the action to start. The problem appeared to be that a squall line of storms in mid-Missouri stole all the good moisture giving anything north where the intense jet was no instability. There were two tornadoes reported for the day. One in the storm just north of us which we are doubting happened (we were watching the storm at the time of the report and there was scud rising from the ground but we did not see any organized rotation or funnel). The other was in central Minnesota and the description in the SPC storm log was “Large Tornado getting Bigger” which is very funny! We watched this storm ride off into the sunset which was pretty and prepared for a down day with some log needed rejuvenation.

We’ve traveled over 4000 miles so far and visited South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.