I was watching the weather all morning and into the afternoon for the risk of severe weather today. After the severe thunderstorm watch was issued for Stearns County, I started to get ready for the chase.
There was two areas of interest for me, one to the northwest of me with ongoing storms that were severe warned near Alexandria, MN but you can see on the satellite image, there was a second line of disturbed clouds in western Stearns County and northern Kandiyohi County. I was expecting this line to explode into some discrete storms that I could chase close to home.
It did not take long for the storms to start to explode as you can see in the satellite image below.
Unfortunately, work got in the way and had to deal with something before being able to get out on time so I was about 25 minutes behind the time I wanted to leave and the storms got the jump on me.
I did get on Interstate 94 to head the storms off and intercept them near Monticello, MN and was treated to this just south of Saint Cloud, MN.
About as soon as it formed up, it was blown out by the outflow of the storm as it started moving east. I made the decision to get off the interstate and cross over to Highway 10 and follow the storm to the southeast on Highway 10 just to avoid any river crossing issues. The storm did look good on radar for a time but it soon became a rain maker and nothing special.
So pretty much I got stuck in rush hour traffic on Highway 10 and then made my way down to towards Maple Grove, MN. From there, it was pretty much a nightmare of Twin Cities metro traffic with storms at rush hour. So an hour or so screwing around in the rush hour traffic trying to get to different areas that had damage reports and flooding reports that were not there when I finally showed up, I said screw it and drove home. Saw this on the way home as the storm teased one more time but I just said nope, when home in time to get Laura to bed and write up this blog and continue the blog transfer.
The joke is that I should just hit the Casino this year as my luck might be better. Na, it is not a matter of luck or forecasting, the storms this year are just showing up in the wrong areas to chase in and in a couple cases, just days that nobody was even expecting to be chase days. Oh well, back to work here in the office until I get this blog and website transferred completed.
But yes, being stuck in traffic all day in heavy rain in severe thunderstorm warning did feel like being stuck in a stupid car wash all day.