00:00Meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach, he joins us live from Campus, Illinois.
00:05And Tony, I know you had just sent us in baseball-sized hail that you have and compared to a
00:10baseball.
00:13Yeah, and I've moved into town a little further north of where I got some of that video,
00:17and this is a tennis ball, this is a tennis ball-sized piece of hail.
00:20This is what fell here behind me in the town of Campus.
00:24Fortunately, a lot of this was very widespread.
00:26You see one here, this one's actually from point to point about three inches across.
00:31So we're talking tennis ball to just bigger than baseball in terms of diameter here.
00:36And this, again, about 20 to 30 minutes after the storm went through here.
00:39Campus just did a roll around town.
00:41Again, fortunately, this was very spaced out.
00:43There's a lot of smaller hail on the grass in the fields, so the bigger stones were more spread out.
00:49So I didn't see a lot of intense hail damage in town, just a couple of cracks on some of
00:52the car windshields.
00:53But overall, they really kind of dodged a bullet with hail this big, not as thick in that core.
01:00But this, just the sampling of what this storm has already produced.
01:03We talked about the tornado.
01:04We'll show you that here.
01:05This, again, out of the Pontiac area.
01:07This was early on in the storm's life cycle.
01:10We had this tornado.
01:11It was a brief and fairly weak tornado.
01:13That was the good news here.
01:14This storm had spun up a little bit in a field just to the north and east of the town
01:18of Pontiac.
01:19So we saw just some ground circulation.
01:22The funnel didn't fully condense, but we had multiple areas of circulation.
01:26This was probably a wide, weak, multi-vortex tornado.
01:29We did have some power lines that were hit with this as the tornado crossed the highway in front of
01:34us here.
01:34You're seeing some of that video.
01:36Notice, though, power lines didn't go down with this.
01:38So this was a very weak tornado early on in the storm's life cycle.
01:42But still, pretty dramatic sight here, especially for folks that were looking out.
01:46I've got to say, though, even though the tornado itself occurred, it was actually the rotation in the sky that
01:51was the big thing here before the tornado got going here.
01:55That wall cloud kind of organized for some ratty scud.
01:58And then that rotation really started to tighten.
02:00And then as it passed over, that tornado coming down probably less than half a mile to my north.
02:05And then eventually crossing the road in front of me and about 20,000 different chasers, as Anna has alluded
02:11to here several times, a lot of storm chasers out on that storm.
02:14We've let that storm kind of push off to the east here.
02:17We were kind of stopping to do some recon, a lot of traffic, as I mentioned.
02:20Not all good things come with having a lot of people out here.
02:23Unfortunately, a lot of these back roads get really crowded very quick, and it does slow your progress down.
02:27So stopped here to document some hail.
02:29Right now I'm going to kind of reassess, decide whether, A, I can get back up with that storm.
02:33I'm not sure if I can, but we're going to be talking about, you guys will be talking about showing
02:37radar, other cells that are developing back to the west and southwest of here, southwest of Peoria.
02:43So those might be storms that we're going to be watching here for maybe a renewed round of severe weather.
02:48We have been talking about multiple rounds of severe weather, and this is just the first of several.
02:53So a lot going on here.
02:55Again, we'll show off the hail.
02:56Again, tennis ball size.
02:58And then obviously we talk about hail size here.
03:01Obviously, this doesn't look like a baseball, but it is width.
03:05This is the max width.
03:06That's how you measure the hailstones here.
03:08You don't talk about necessarily that it's round like a baseball.
03:11This has got kind of more of a tennis ball round opinion to it.
03:15This is from point to point when you measure it.
03:18And I measured this just under three inches from point to point.
03:21So this goes into the books as a three-inch hailstone, even though this looks more traditionally like the ball,
03:28the tennis ball, and maybe just smaller than a baseball.
03:30So that is how we're measuring hail here on the back end of the storm here.
03:33Again, campus, Illinois, behind me at a hail of a time not too long ago.
03:40Tony Law back with some great context and jokes, as always.
03:44We're going to check back in with you in another hour.
03:46For now, though, you were telling us about all of the different storms going on.
Comments