Chris Kridler
Chris Kridler is a writer, photographer and storm chaser and author of the Storm Seekers Series of storm-chasing adventures.
Chris Kridler is a writer, photographer and storm chaser and author of the Storm Seekers Series of storm-chasing adventures.
Our chase season has been the domain of New Mexico, no doubt about it. And today we explored the arid southeast corner of the state and the adjacent area of Texas, which was a lot less arid as the day went on thanks to flooding.
We skipped from Kermit, Texas, up to Jal, New Mexico, watching developing clouds while knowing the better chance of a tornado was farther south. We just didn’t have the heart to chase in that territory and took our chances. And the storm we followed came pretty close. It had a rotating wall cloud as it crossed the highway, and then it enrobed itself in rain and hail and moved east into an area with no roads at all. So much for that.
We dashed north and caught this rotating wall cloud.
So we repositioned east and filmed beautiful if linear storms and, eventually, a rainbow after driving through the flooded town of Seminole, Texas. Even on marginal days like this, it’s satisfying to see the sky at work.
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.
Maybe it was a longing to chase in more “traditional” parts of Tornado Alley after so much time in New Mexico, or just to spend a little time in Kansas, but we drove on up through Kansas from Liberal to southern Nebraska to chase a pretty little low-precipitation storm on May 29, 2023.
Mammatus over the tiny base of the storm and curious cows west of Trenton, Nebraska.
It wasn’t much. But the scenery was beautiful, and the cows were amusing. And we’re hard-core, I guess!
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show.
Storm chasers traditionally have a steak after seeing a tornado. If you have time. The irony is, when you’re busy chasing, you don’t have a ton of time to stop at a steak house or even an Applebee’s. So sometimes, you end up anticipating the tornado with a steak in advance. Especially if you stop at The Big Texan in Amarillo.
That’s where Alethea Kontis, Jason Persoff and I had lunch on May 28, 2023. Jason was happy with his chase the day before and didn’t plan on going out, so we said farewell after lunch, and Alethea and I went in search of storms. Chances weren’t high of a tornado, but what followed was an extraordinary sequence of events that culminated in a tornado and a powerful, highly structured supercell in the Texas Panhandle.
Beautiful structure evolved in the storm.
The tornado southeast of Stratford, Texas.
What a beauty!
Click on any image to see captions and start a slide show.
May 26 and 27 continued the theme of 2023: storm chasing in New Mexico. Specifically, chasing in and out and around Clovis, whose radar site was unfortunately down.
Alethea Kontis and I met up with Jason Persoff and saw pretty but unambitious storms on May 26 that petered out early. May 27 was more promising and brought us around in multiple circles as we chased rotating supercells. It was really a beautiful day of desert and flood and spectacular skies, as the video shows. We made a couple of stops by a gorgeous old church in Taiban that one chaser after another visited to get a few shots.
Back to the church, with a supercell in the distance.
So with spinning storms and spinning chasers, we dizzily ended the day with a pretty sunset and a few lightning bolts. And I had to get a few shots of The Big Lebowski murals on the walls of the Clovis bowling alley. Dude!
Roll over images to see captions, and click on any image to start a slide show.
We stopped in Tucumcari, New Mexico, to check out the old Route 66 landmarks. Tee Pee Curios is super cool.
We’d seen a beautiful, dusty supercell the previous day and ended up in Amarillo. We headed west toward New Mexico, not expecting much, and played around in the strip of cool vintage Retro 66 landmarks in Tucumcari. Tee Pee Curios is amazing and filled with wonderful goodies.
Speaking for myself, I was out of practice in the Chaser Patience department. We considered giving up, though I wanted to hedge our bets and stop and do some timelapses of the clouds just east of the Texas border.
The sky was gorgeous, and finally, storms initiated in the Land of Enchantment. So it was back over the border, where we were greeted by a towering anvil filled with mammatus over one of a couple of storms that had formed. As afternoon turned to evening, one became spectacularly dominant, a layered, spinning supercell spitting out almost constant lightning. The video is absolutely magical.
A sparky lightning show ensued.
The bad news: Wind blew over my tripod with one of my Nikons on board, damaging my favorite wide-angle lens. I’d had the 12-24mm for years and didn’t realize that night that it wasn’t working correctly after its plummet to the earth, so I had issues with soft focus on the later photos I took of the supercell. Drat! I’m writing this almost a year later; the lens has been replaced. But the rest of the trip meant being very judicious about focusing if I used that lens, or I just used another lens.
Click on any image to start a slide show.
A view of the inflow features.
We saw the potential even as we left Florida, and I was determined that we would chase this day if we could get there. It was a long haul, and we got on the storms a bit late, so our position wasn’t great to see the tornado our friend Jason Persoff saw. And a later tornado was seen by chasers who didn’t mind driving into the heart of the beast. I don’t have much stomach for core-chasing, so we stayed back and were treated to gorgeous, dramatic structure.
As darkness fell, this dusty storm got extremely sparky.
The storm turned into a dust-eating UFO after dark as it moved into the Texas Panhandle, and we got hypnotic lightning shots and timelapses before the chase was done.
Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.
This is the one storm from 2022 that I didn’t post last year as I worked through all of my photos … maybe because it was so epic. Or maybe because we didn’t see exactly what we wanted to see.
Tornadic supercell near Morton, Texas.
This time we moved with the dust back toward the storm. And I confess, I wasn’t ready to dive-bomb into the core to see what was on the other side. What was clear is that there was a big tornado in there, but we didn’t have the fantastic view the chasers who hung out among the falling giant hailstones had. Yet we did have a view of the monster. As the power lines sang an eerie tune in the inflow winds, we watched it get closer and decided to see if we could get into a position where we had a view of the supercell’s base. And maybe a tornado.
"Supercell Skyscraper" – A dusty beast of a spinning tornadic supercell looms over west Texas on May 23, 2002. Prints available at StolenButter.com. Photo © Chris Kridler, ChrisKridler.com
We bailed on the conga line of storm chasers – so many chasers – and dropped south to get a tremendous view of the stacked supercell. My favorite image of this I call “Texas Skyscraper,” and it’s available at Stolen Butter Gallery.
After Alethea had to get medieval on the sovereign of a local gas station to let us fill up – they were trying to close because of the storm, even though they were safely out of the path and we were running on fumes – we pursued the cell into its lightning phase. It was very difficult to keep up, and eventually we let it slip off into the darkness, a wild runaway in the night.
The storm was a prolific lightning producer.
Some chasers had close calls that went along with their fantastic view of this storm. Check out Pecos Hank Schyma’s harrowing video. I’ve done a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking in the wake of this chase, but it’s hard to come up with a perfect scenario even if I could relive the day.
This storm pretty much wrapped up our 2022 chase season. At least it was a real storm – a powerful and visually stunning supercell. And if I look hard enough into my photos, I see the big tornado.
Now we’re about to head out to the Plains again, much later than usual given the quiet pattern in Tornado Alley. I’m not expecting much, but it will be great to be on the road again.
To get all the latest updates, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)
If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!
Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.
Instead, I opted to bring out Big Bertha (the 200-500mm lens) with mixed results. Even when the photos are rough, images of these launches always have a touch of the spectacular with all the fire and color.
I love the blue in the SpaceX rocket flames.
The GoPro timelapse (shot in nightlapse mode on a Hero 8) turned out nicely. Check out the video for 45 seconds of magic.
Roll over any photo to see a caption, or click on an image to start a slide show.
A side view of the hailstorm that tempted me into a short, loud chase.
But then, in spite of the murk, I saw the cool structure on this severe storm and couldn’t resist. Besides, the hail core looked decent, especially for Florida’s Space Coast, so I headed north from Rockledge to see if I could intercept it. Or, more accurately, to let it chase me. It followed me as I headed north.
I was behind the eight ball from the start of this very short chase, mostly thanks to the prodigious traffic lights of Cocoa. That said, when I saw a perfect hail shelter – a carport at a closed business – I couldn’t resist parking in this strategic spot and waiting to be cored. That’s what chasers call letting yourself be run over by a storm’s hail core.
The experience of being under a metal carport in a hailstorm is satisfyingly loud. These weren’t giant stones, but for Florida? They were pretty good. I measured multiple 1.5-inch stones. They melted quickly. And they shredded leaves on the trees.
I didn’t get a chance to get a radar snapshot in the middle of the barrage, but an even bigger core passed to my southeast. I’m wondering how big those hailstones were.
You can check out my chase on the video, and here are a few photos. Roll over any one to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show.
It’s been a weird week for us here in east-central Florida and the Space Coast, but the weather reflects the overall weather pattern, with the southern branch of the jet stream enhancing our chances of severe storms.
After a ridiculous amount of driving in the rain and horrible traffic, we stopped south of Melbourne at Turkey Creek and got this fantastic view of the supercell, which dumped tons of small hail as it moved south.
We left our viewing spot after reviewing the radar and got on a good-looking storm a bit farther south, following it all the way to Vero Beach through horrible traffic and a lot of rain. Once we got south of it, we were able to get a couple of shots of the pretty structure from a bridge over Turkey Creek in the Palm Bay area. At this time, it was dumping drifts of small hail on parts of Melbourne, but we wanted to stay out of the core in hopes of getting photos.
There weren’t many more opportunities for that, given the territory, but we parked under an overhang in Indian Harbor Shores and waited for the hail to come to us. There was lots of it – but it was all small. Still, it felt like being in a hurricane for a few minutes, and there was lots of minor tree debris and flooding on the road afterward.
There were many suggestive shapes in the murk as the tornado-warned storm moved east beyond the Indian River Lagoon on April 27.
The next day, April 27, I worked all day, then saw storms headed our way. They seemed promising, so I headed out to the west side of Cocoa near I-95 to take a look. I got into some small hail, then tried to get into position on a tornado-warned storm coming at me without actually getting creamed by said tornado. It was radar-indicated, and while the video shows curvature to the storm amid the deluge, I didn’t see anything tornadic.
But I dropped slightly south to Rockledge to intercept another storm, and it did a dramatic dance for me before moving east with a tornado warning on it. I hastened to the edge of the Indian River Lagoon and saw what was probably the wildest storm I’ve ever seen in Florida. The structure was fluffy and mushy and tinged with green, presumably from the hail, but a real live rotating wall cloud formed under it. It wasn’t rotating quickly, but it was stunning. Was anything happening in the murk? I wasn’t fully prepared for my “gentleman’s chase” and couldn’t really zoom in well with the lenses I had, but my imagination was working overtime seeing funnels in the gunk.
Check out the video and see what you think.
I’m starting to feel warmed up for Tornado Alley. If you want to keep up with our chases this season, please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. (Alethea’s here on YouTube as well.)
If you like our photos and video, won’t you consider throwing a few bucks into the storm chasing gas fund? Thank you!
Here are photos from both days of chasing. Roll over an image to see the caption, or click on any one to start a slide show.