SUN 07 JUN
A first for me today - entered Canada as the best environment for supercells (and tornadoes) was north of the border. We targetted Kirkella MB, close to the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border and sat for several hours waiting for storms to initiate, sat directly underneath a stalled boundary. Towards 17:00 convection began to rapidly fire overhead and just to our south, producing a left and right split that raced away to the north, before a more organised supercell evolved to our south. We dropped down to Cromer MB and watched as a wall cloud began to form, and it felt like this supercell could be close to producing a tornado. However, after a while it began to lose a lot of its structure as it became outflow dominant and soon after completely shrivelled up and died.
Thereafter, there wasn't a huge amount of excitement - storms had all lined up on the frontal boundary and were largely outflow dominant. We tried to shimmy southwards down the line to areas of broader mid-level rotation, but they were clearly high-based and struggling. In the end we gave up chasing and drifted east to our hotel in Brandon MB.
Having never chased (or even visited) Canada before a few things stood out to me - the roads are, generally, in poorer condition than the equivalents in the US, many are unpaved or randomly become unpaved halfway down the road. Very few roads have shoulders. Phone signal is questionable in parts of the Prairies, and you can drive for a fair length of time without even coming across a petrol station. This, coupled with the poorly performing storms, made for a rather frustrating chase day.
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