July 29th 2008 Squall line

I basically stayed up and waited for this powerful line to come through. I didnt want to waste the gas driving to it although I probably should have. The line had formed some hours before and was solidly built moving through IL. What was worrisome was that the instability quickly dropped off pretty much from the border east. But I thought, I live close enough to the border anyway not much was going to happen to it?

So I parked up my gear and went to find a suitable place to watch it come in. I wanted to find a place just outside of town. Where the lights from town would illuminate the base and add some color. So I sat just outside in the country with lights from town a ways off.

The first image below is the line coming in. Storm motions were faster than I had anticipated. This line was moving very fast.  You can see some definite striations here in this shot.



Literally one or two shots later its already on me! Banding, striation structures showing up! I had to up the ISO on the camera to compensate for the storms speed. Playing around with settings to try and not blur things up. The storm was moving so quickly that I screwed up almost all the shots.



This was cool! The orange glow in the background was from a steel plant. I hadnt planned on that. But I thought WOW, I have to get a shot of that illuminating the base. But like the storm the light was gone in a matter of secounds. You can make out the stacked plate like structure this line had.



This below was a quicker exposure to try and pull out some definition. I had to up the ISO to max to get a faster shutter to pull this off! The storms base was now very mean looking. Ragid but solid structure gave it an ominous personality. I was also noticing that there was very little rain with it. Large amounts of wind but little rain. The storm was quickly falling apart I think. But its still strange that there is hardly any rain?

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I made a note of that place and I think I am going to go back and try to shoot there again. The lighting was just cool!  The storm had almost no lightning after moving through so I didnt try for very long!