Date: 26 June 2012

Location: Southern Saskatchewan from Swift Current to Moose Jaw to Regina, SK

Shoot Type: Storm Chase

Synopsis:
Evan Bookbinder and I intercepted the first storm, an early day elevated supercell, near Swift Current. We followed this storm east along the Trans-Canada Hwy until the structure of the storm became less interesting. We then decided to head east to Moose Jaw to reposition ourselves for the better, late afternoon/early evening show. A supercell formed rapidly about 40 miles to our southwest, and we plotted an intercept down in the Coderre-Courval area. We were in excellent position for a time along Hwy 626, north northeast of Courval, but we needed to go south to Hwy 363 before we could continue east...then eventually back north. During this reposition time, we did observe a distant tornado back to our west-northwest shortly after 6:00pm CDT. After that tornado dissipated, we continued east along Hwy 363 then back north between 6:20 and 6:40pm. During this time, a large tornado was occurring well to our west-northwest that we could not see because of the hilly terrain to our west. We managed to photograph amazing supercell structure, however, during the 6:40 to 6:50 time frame. We followed this supercell to north of Moose Jaw then intercepted approaching menacing squall line with nice shelf cloud structure and cloud-to-ground lightning. We raced east to stay ahead of this, but eventually let it overtake us as we came closer to Regina. At Regina in the wake of the storm, an amazing display of mammatus greeted us, but unfortunately it was in shadow. If it was not in shadow, this mammatus could have the best mammatus both of us have evern seen. All in all, an exciting chase!