Northern Illinois Tornadoes

 A tornado outbreak occurred across eastern Iowa and Northern Illinois today, April 9. Here is what we saw. A funnel cloud formed to our north as we drove west on I-80 from the junction with 280 near Davenport, Iowa. The video ends at 5:15 PM CDT and two minutes later, a tornado was reported to the northeast near Donahue:

An intense supercell produced a tornado that caused damage at Ashton, Rochelle, Fairdale, and Kirkland in Lee, Ogle, and De Kalb counties in Illinois. We got our first good look at this storm when it was near Rochelle, while we were to the the southwest on I-88 near Ashton. This video runs from 7:02-7:04 PM CDT on April 9, 2015:

It became more clear how intense this storm was as we approached Rochelle, as spectacular lightning became very frequent. We are at the junction of I-88 and Illinois 251 at the beginning of the video, and near the junction of I-39 and Illinois 72 by the end. The video runs from 7:08-7:23 PM CDT on April 9, 2015:

Mapleton Tornado

Thursday, April 9 is the 4th anniversary of the EF-3 Mapleton, IA tornado. I have video from Onawa, IA from 6:43 - 6:56 PM CDT - about 40 minutes before Mapleton was hit - of what may have been the beginnings of the Mapleton tornado:

From just east of Onawa, on highway 175, from 7:00 - 7:03 we saw a circulation cross the road to our west:

I have plenty of video from this storm, and we only saw the tornado after dark, so I made a slideshow to show how it all evolved: