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On the second day of my Tornado Alley sojourn, meant to get me in position for subsequent chases, I managed to catch up with a cluster of pretty storms in northwest Kansas.

The storms were, at one time, severe, but when I photographed them in a gorgeous twilight, they were simply prolific lightning producers.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

The May 25, 2012, chase led me to a pretty backlit tornado in north-central Kansas.

I started the day with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Dayna Vettese, Brad Rousseau, and Simon Eng, but by chase’s end, we were scattered to the winds.

We stopped in Great Bend, Kansas, targeting the triple point to the west where warm front and dryline met. We then drifted to Rush Center, where we met lots of chasers, and one tower went up in a hurry. This is the first storm we chased, along with a zillion other chasers, who drove like crazy people through a grid of dirt roads like a pack of rats let loose in a maze.

 
That storm didn’t produce the cheese, but at dark, storms in the line went crazy. Some chasers reported seeing as many as five tornadoes, some at or after dark; makes me feel like a slacker for just finding one.

Roll over a photo to see a caption, or click on any image to start a slide show.

Sometimes you’re rewarded by playing the marginal setup when it comes to storm chasing. Our group opted out of the 10 percent tornado risk on Thursday, May 24, as issued by the Storm Prediction Center for Wisconsin and environs. We didn’t like the idea of chasing fast-moving storms in the trees up north.

Instead, chasing with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Dayna Vettese, Brad Rousseau, and Simon Eng, we headed toward eastern Kansas.

After a lot of waiting and hanging out with cows in a sunny meadow in Garnett, Kansas, we were fortunate to catch a late-day storm that was beautifully sculpted and produced tremendous lightning, though it was never severe-warned.

Roll over a photo to see a caption, or click on any image to start a slide show.

It’s about 4 a.m. CDT, and I’m making this post fast, so I can get to sleep. I had a glorious chase in southwest Kansas today (May 20 is still today for me, at the moment), as minor storms firing off the dryline offered lovely photo opportunities as they gained strength. I started with a big group of friends, but the company soon narrowed to Jason Persoff and Robert Balogh as we split in different directions around the storms. We kept going after the southern storms forming on the line, all in the vicinity of Pratt, Kansas. Here is just one shot; I have a lot more to post, but time ran out tonight after trouble on the road.

Just 10 miles west of Wichita late at night on the way into town and to our hotel rooms, Jason hit a deer. Or maybe we should say the deer hit Jason. Either way, Jason was OK, but the deer and the rental car were both in bad shape. Many phone calls, the kind attention of a wonderful police officer, and a tow truck later, and all Jason’s stuff was in Robert’s and my vehicles, and we were able to get under way again. We got in about 2 a.m., and it’s taken me forever to get all the photos off my cards. I just don’t have time to process them all tonight before lapsing into unconsciousness, so … more later!

The prospects seemed good today for tornadic supercells, the kind I’ve been waiting for, especially in south-central Kansas. Sometimes, you take a chance on an area where you hope for long-lived, photogenic storms rather than going after the other stuff. Today, it was all “other stuff,” as storms fired off the dryline and zoomed north, prompting a few unimpressive tornado reports. (To clarify: Yes, there were tornadoes, just not what I hoped for.) But meeting other storm chasers was fun.

You can’t always get what you want. Today, I don’t think I got what I needed, either – I’m still looking for Mr. Goodstorm, the supercell that will make this trip photographically worthwhile, before I go broke.

 

 

It’s hardly worth summarizing today, except to note that the days with the highest expectations – a couple of days ago, this seemed as if it would be the best Plains chase day of the first half of May – often don’t meet those expectations. Were there storms? Yes. But despite some tornadoes early in the day in an area deemed not worth chasing, overall, this was not a big tornado day, despite a strong upper trough and other good dynamics. In the morning, clouds and rain covered much of the area, but the grunge moved out, allowing for heating and therefore energy for storms. But the dewpoints stayed depressed, and the clustered storms in northeast Colorado/northwest Kansas didn’t quite get their act together to produce tornadoes. I made a conscious choice to go after an isolated cell in my target area instead, around Dodge City and north, but it fizzled, and I ended up seeing little worth noting. I did drive in a lot of big circles, though.

 

I have extensive archives from my early storm chasing years. I chronicled almost every day on the road, even bust days, at the old SkyDiary site, with lots of photos. In the interest of collecting everything in one place, I’m moving the highlights of the older chases over to ChrisKridler.com. With that in mind, this post collects some of the accounts from 2008 and select photos to accompany them.

1-2 May 2008

The day after: The day after the first chase of the year, that is. I am trying to achieve that Zen balance between overwhelming anticipation and extreme pessimism. The results of yesterday, May 1, met me in the middle. I started the day in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and moved west and north to meet the dryline and what I thought was the best potential near the Oklahoma-Kansas border.

I saw a great rotating storm, but I did not see a tornado (a spinup was reported with my storm; perhaps I wasn’t close enough to see it). And actually, because it was so gorgeous, with its crisp anvil, aggressively bubbling flanking line and a short period of flying-saucer-like laminar beauty as it moved with the line of storms, I wasn’t disappointed when I saw the grainy twilight tornado video from Oklahoma on The Weather Channel this morning. I had a good chase.

Now, there will be a lull of at least a couple of days. I guess I’ll set out from my current stop of Independence, Kansas, and dig up a few more Tornado Alley tourist attractions to see. I enjoyed seeing Bartlesville’s oil well in Oklahoma yesterday. But one can gaze upon Cawker City’s big ball of twine just so many times before it becomes too dazzling to bear …

3 May 2008

Chasing choices: People who don’t chase storms sometimes wonder how I can’t see a tornado when there are dozens reported on a particular day. It looks easy when you see all those red triangles on The Weather Channel or Storm Prediction Center maps. But what the maps don’t tell you is (1) a lot occur at night; (2) if they are in certain parts of the country, like the South, they may hide amid trees and hills; (3) some are wrapped in rain, even if it is daylight; (4) not all reports are valid; and (5) even if they are visible, you have to be in the right place at the right time.

Sometimes a chaser decides it’s just not worthwhile. I wasn’t the only chaser to choose not to try to chase the squall line in Arkansas and environs today. Even though there have been several tornado reports, I would have been dealing with the aforementioned trees and hills. Not only that, but I would have had to drive many hours on little sleep, through a squall line going only slightly slower than myself, meaning I would have been driving in horrible rain etc. for a long time; and after all that driving and marginal chasing, I would have had to return back west to be in position for what I hope will be a better (and more visible) chase in a couple of days. And there are the gas prices.

So after Thursday’s chase and late night and not quite enough sleep, I decided to take it easy and amble from Kansas down to Norman, Oklahoma, on Friday. I always seem to come back to Norman at some point while chasing. On the way, I stopped in Sedan, Kansas. It’s a cute town with wonderful old buildings on the main street and a great art deco theater, among other things. Hollywood location scouts should give it a look. It also claims to have the longest yellow brick road – as in “The Wizard of Oz” – but I must admit that the “road” was a disappointment. It was a sidewalk along a city block, populated by bricks with donors’ names on them. It was a valiant effort, but it would not be an efficient way to reach the Emerald City. I don’t think Dorothy and her friends could link arm and arm and still fit as they skipped toward their destiny.

I’ve added a couple of photos to the roadside attraction pictures after wandering aimlessly today into eastern New Mexico and around the Texas panhandle. I saw lots of antelope and ended up at The Big Texan in Amarillo, where the Cloud 9 Tours group was also enjoying some steak.

5 May 2008

Hail avoidance: The Cinco de Mayo chase involved no Mexican food, tons of driving, little sleep and a monster supercell. I got on it a bit later than I would have liked, in Roswell, New Mexico, where it had a pretty laminar look that I only caught the tail end of. I attempted to follow it northeast and saw the disaster it left in its wake – lots of disabled vehicles and lots of big hailstones by the side of the road.

I watched the storm just behind it for a bit as it spun an interesting wall cloud – next to a stunning curtain of white hail – and as soon as the first hailstones started falling around me, I bailed. I decided it just wasn’t worth it. I’ve had my car destroyed before, and I didn’t want to go into the belly of the beast on a road in the middle of nowhere that would soon be in darkness. Instead I went straight east out of Roswell, and got a nice phone update on the beast from Bill Hark, who was looking at the amazing radar images. The storm cluster was so huge that I got a neat look at its south side even on that road, and got some cool after-dark time exposures. But eventually I headed to Lubbock to stay ahead of what was becoming a line. I’ll post more photos later; I’m pretty tired. There’s no point in putting out a Don’t Disturb sign at the Motel 6 because many of the screaming guests have the motto “Disturb All the Time.” Today looks like an interesting chase, too, and I have to summon up a few brain cells to do a forecast.

6 May 2008

Redemption: Let’s just say, for all the perceived tornado potential – with the seeming right combination of upper-level winds, moisture, etc. – May 6 sure was a cluster day. Clusters of storms, or clustersomething. But the lightning I saw as I drove east of Lubbock was tremendous and redeemed my day. The best stuff was when I was still driving and it was happening all around me, the kinds of close bolts that cause a concussion like a cannonball. B-BOOM! Impressive. I got several good shots. Looks like one more chase day, anyway… but there’s no guarantee of its quality given all the current storms steamrolling through the area.

Click on any image to start a slide show of images.

8 May 2008

The spin: The spin is the thing, and finally, I saw some real rotation and the classic signs of tornado formation in a storm in western Kansas, south of Dighton and northwest of Dodge City, as my Plains chase winds down. No tornado, but there might have been one in the rain and hail; several power poles were snapped in the area. And the whole thing evolved into a beautiful laminar shelf cloud that raced south.

 

19 May 2008

Fire and rain: The post-chase melancholy has set in, especially since it looks like there will be major severe weather in the Plains later this week, and I won’t be there. We finally had a little rain here in central Florida this weekend after the conflagration of the previous week. A lot of people’s lives went up in smoke.

I got to witness first-hand the drama of watching a farm in the path of the flames. There was something terrible and inexorable about the fire, especially when, on that quiet dirt road, the crackle of the flames was so audible and then their bright orange tongues shot through the trees. The long grass was so crunchy underfoot, it seemed it would take little for all of it to burn. Fortunately, a helicopter, some trucks and some good people stopped the advance.

 

23 May 2008

Love that lightning: It doesn’t compare to the freakin’ tornado wedgefest in the Plains this week, which work commitments kept me from chasing, but at least there was some nice lightning here in Florida on May 23. At first, Cheryl Chang and I checked out the storms. Then I stuck around a parking lot while the last one came through close to midnight, and I snapped lightning photos in Rockledge. Hope we get lots more picturesque storms this summer.

 

June 2008: Tornado quest fulfilled

Whirlwind trip: I couldn’t resist one more chance to chase tornadoes in the Plains, so after some frustrating flight cancellations, I managed to get out there the morning of June 5, when the Storm Prediction Center was issuing a high risk and anticipating a possible tornado outbreak. I’d also anticipated a day like that, which is why I came out in the first place, but the outbreak didn’t materialize. Even local newspapers had headlines that said the “dire forecast” didn’t come about.

I drove from Kansas City into Nebraska and back to Kansas anyway and caught a beautiful shelf cloud.

 

The trip was worth it. I saw some wonderful storms anyway, especially the following two days, while chasing with Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland.

On June 7, west of Beatrice, Nebraska, we checked out the distant anvils from a line of storms forming to the west. A line was undesirable, but we hoped one cell would break out and dominate. We checked out multiple storms, finally aiming for a cell in Kansas near Osborne. It had a beautiful curvature indicating rotation, funnels, and eventually, a slender tornado. Here are the photos from this mini chase. Click on any one to start a slide show with captions.

 

More pretty pictures

Once I got home to Florida, I caught several lightning storms and even helped cover Tropical Storm Fay for my newspaper. Below are a few more photos from these events. Click on any one to start a slide show with captions.

 

 

 

I have extensive archives from my early storm chasing years. I chronicled almost every day on the road, even bust days, at the old SkyDiary site, with lots of photos. In the interest of collecting everything in one place, I’m moving the highlights of the older chases and journals over to ChrisKridler.com with select photos to accompany them.

4 May 2007: The Greensburg, Kansas, tornado

Epic quest: A beast is stalking Kansas tonight. In the morning, we’ll see horrendous footage of damage and hear terrible tales of injuries or worse in Greensburg. I didn’t see the tornado, though it hit in my general target area for the day. The thing is, it hit at or after dark, and I had already moved on to a storm I could actually see before sunset. (Ironically, I think I saw the genesis of the storm when it was a paltry split from an earlier cell, north of the one my friends and I went to see.)

I happened to meet up with Mike Theiss and Brad Riley for the chase at my initial target, Pratt, Kansas, just down the road from Greensburg. And hearing of tornadoes in Oklahoma, we went that way for a bit before it got dark, then gave up the chase before the monster Greensburg tornado occurred. It’s probably better that I didn’t try to chase it at night, but part of me wishes I’d been on that cell.

Several chasers apparently stuck with the Greensburg cell, a dangerous thing to do at night, hence the image on KOTV’s Web page. There are amazing reports of 60 percent or more of Greensburg being destroyed and of a damage path that could be a couple of miles wide. There’s a tremendous radar hook on the storm, which put down at least a wedge with a rope satellite, according to storm reports. At least so far, there haven’t been a lot of tornadoes today.

All in all, it probably was a chase not worth 34 hours of almost constant driving from Florida through a full chase day, with 1.5 hours of naps. And I certainly didn’t drive that marathon to watch nice little towns be destroyed. Like other storm chasers, I always hope that if there’s a tornado, it occurs in an abandoned field. The reports are eerie, though, and reminiscent of a fictional scenario in my yet-to-be published novel about storm chasers.

5 May 2007: Near misses

Happy with a little: This was another crazy chase day. I was chasing for, I think, about 12 hours. TWELVE. Usually, the real chase starts in mid- to late afternoon and ends at dark, but the Storm Prediction Center’s high risk Armageddon forecast and the anticipated speed of the storms made me seek to get into position early. Jim Leonard’s advice was to go west, not north, and I started at Buffalo, Oklahoma, which I drove through about twenty times today. I followed one of the very first storms of the day up into Kansas, but the early storms bunched together and weren’t much to write home about, so I decided to go back south to the dryline.

I was rewarded with photogenic storm after storm, but the stupid things were all speeding north at 45 mph in an area with few roads. More than once, I gave up pursuit, and they tornadoed among chaser traffic jams in Kansas. I saw a little funnel (shear funnel, I think) on one, and it later produced tornadoes in Kansas. Other tornadoes were reported today, but you really had to be in the right place at the right time.

I thought I had my storm when a gorgeous thing south of Buffalo produced a big rotating wall cloud. It didn’t produce, but it sooo wanted to. A couple of chasers got amazing video of a tornado crossing I-40 and later hitting Sweetwater, way south of where I was. Wow. I was a little down after seeing that, because I had considered zooming down to I-40 and taking my chances. But today was all chances. Though there were tons of storms, they were not easy to catch unless you were ahead of them.

Then, as it got dark, storms started dropping big wedge tornadoes, again, terrorizing residents who had Greensburg on their minds. I just tried to stay out of the way at that point. I’m still baffled by chasers who go after this stuff at night, but maybe they have the radar in their cars. I haven’t spent the big bucks for that yet, so I did my whole chase today with nothing but weather radio to keep me informed (bravo, National Weather Service). Considering the circumstances, I was pretty pleased with that storm with the wall cloud, and I got a lot of other photos I think will come out very nicely of various storms. I’ll post them later – again, I’m too tired. It’s 1 a.m. in Enid, Oklahoma, technically May 6, no matter what the date above says.

7 May 2007

Waiting: This feels more like a chase day – I’m waiting around with friends in Aspermont, Texas, waiting to see where to go to chase a marginal chance of decent storms today. In one car are Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland; in another, Mike Theiss and Brad Riley. We were thinking west. Now maybe a little east. Right now, we’re checking satellite and surface observations and waiting. The last few days have been nothing but driving, it seems, so I welcome a break. Yesterday, May 6, was a line chase, as cells merged and produced photogenic but not very powerful storms, at least in southwest Oklahoma.

9 May 2007

Car wash: We chased a squall line Tuesday, May 8, or it chased us. It was messy but kinda pretty. The rain was incredibly intense. An isolated storm would be nice. With the computer models the way they are, forecasting a shutdown of stormy weather, this chase could easily end with a whimper. I’ll have to see how today goes.

12 May 2007

Rotation: I’ve ended what I hope is only the first phase of my Tornado Alley chase. I feel as if I have unfinished business, because even though the trip wrapped up with a nice, rotating, tornado-warned supercell in Texas, I didn’t see the tornado I wanted to see on this trip.

I still saw some good storms, and compared with the non-action of 2006, it was great – just not ultimately satisfying. I love being in the Plains, anyway. It’s beautiful country, and the towns have so much character. The freedom of driving from place to place, following the weather, is unparalleled. I would like to live a life like that every day. Maybe I need to buy more lottery tickets.

Today’s the anniversary of two big chase events: the Attica tornadoes of 2004 and the South Plains/Lone Star tornado/monster hail event of 2005. This year, I spent the big day napping with the dogs and going to dinner with my husband back in Florida, because my chase is on hold.

May 9 was the last chase day. It started in Abilene, like the day before, only this time, I waited around with my friends for what we hoped was an isolated storm. When a shower formed in front of the line and strengthened, we headed off and punched through it. Our group saw a skinny funnel as we came out the other side, and then we saw persistent rotation and wall clouds. The rotation and the storm’s movement were slow; the latter was a relief after the speed-demon storms of the weekend. And the rotation was enough to inspire a warning.

A tornado report followed as the storm neared Throckmorton, but our eyes were glued on this thing at the time, and none of us saw contact with the ground, despite ominous features. I’d like to see photographic evidence of the alleged tornado.

Our group got a bit separated, but we all chose to stair-step northeast on a farm road that started paved and soon became gravelly pudding. It’s a miracle the Element made it through, and there were some unwelcome thrills on the way. After that, I was glad to stay on paved roads ahead of the storm. It looked linear again, and then, as it approached Wichita Falls, appeared to have new rotation. Amazing. There was a pronounced inflow tail and beautiful structure, but it just wasn’t going to do it. As darkness fell, it washed over town and started the process of washing the red Texas mud off my car.

 

I’m reconstructing and enhancing this report ten years later as I move content over from the old SkyDiary website. This is still one of my most stunning chases. I only wish I’d had better gear and experience before I went into this day! But luck certainly had a hand in what we saw.

There was a lot of tough slogging in 2004 with few storms to chase in early May. After thousands of miles of driving over almost two weeks — which was about the span of my chasecation — and the bust of May 11, with its unfulfilled tornado watch, May 12 showed a lot of potential. And boy, did it pay off.

We started the day in Colby, Kansas. I drove Dave Lewison and me. With us were Scott McPartland and Pete Ventre in Scott’s car, and Mark Robinson, David Sills and Sarah Scriver in theirs. Our chase group (which Charles Edwards and others began to call “the Auto Club,” a la TWISTER) all agreed about southwest Kansas, though with variations on the exact target, from just east of Liberal on the Oklahoma border all the way to Dodge City and Pratt.

The Storm Prediction Center issued a slight risk of severe storms with a 5 percent tornado probability in our target area. The 1630Z discussion said:

..CENTRAL/SRN PLAINS…

SLY FLOW HAS CONTINUED TO INCREASE GULF MOISTURE TO THE POINT WHERE THERE IS POTENTIALLY A VERY UNSTABLE AIR MASS S OF COLD FRONT AND E OF DRY LINE. A SUBSTANTIAL CAP WILL DELAY INITIATION UNTIL LATER THIS AFTERNOON. AS SURFACE LOW DEEPENS…SELY FLOW WILL INCREASE LOW LEVEL MOISTURE WWD INTO SERN CO. THIS WILL LIKELY BE AREA OF INITIAL CONVECTIVE DEVELOPMENT WITH ADDITIONAL STORMS ALONG COLD FRONT KS AND DOWN THE DRY LINE VICINITY OK/TX BORDER.

DEEP LAYER SHEAR OF 40-50 KT AND A VEERING HODOGRAPH IN THE SFC-1 KM LAYER..COUPLED WITH MLCAPES LIKELY IN EXCESS OF 3000 J/KG…SUPPORT A SUPERCELL MODE OF STORMS. PRIMARY THREAT WILL BE VERY LARGE HAIL HOWEVER AT LEAST ISOLATED TORNADOES ARE LIKELY IN AREAS OF ENHANCE LOW LEVEL CONVERGENCE AND SHEAR VICINITY DRY LINE AND COLD FRONT.

By 20Z – 3 p.m. central time – the discussion had updated with a greater tornado threat:

AIR MASS EAST OF THE DRYLINE HAS BECOME VERY UNSTABLE EARLY THIS AFTERNOON WITH MLCAPE BETWEEN 2000 AND 3000 J/KG ACROSS WRN AND CENTRAL OK INTO S CENTRAL KS. INTERESTINGLY…BRN SHEAR NUMBERS ARE 60-70 M2/S2 JUST ALONG/SE OF THE BOUNDARY AWAITING FOR THE WEAK CAP TO BREAK THAT IS STILL OVER CENTRAL OK. LATEST RUC MODEL INDICATES THAT CONVECTIVE DEVELOPMENT COULD OCCUR BY 00Z OVER CENTRAL KS…AND NEAR THE FRONT/DRYLINE INTERSECTION AFTER 00Z. POINT FORECAST SOUNDINGS INDICATE THAT BRN SHEAR VALUES WILL BE AROUND 80 M2/S2 INCREASING THE THREAT TO ISOLATED TORNADOES ACROSS EXTREME S CENTRAL KS/NWRN OK JUST EAST OF THE SURFACE LOW.

We stopped a couple of times to get data on the way, the last time in Meade. It was clear we were behind the dryline/front, with low dewpoints in the mid-50s. The storms would fire on the dry push bulging out east ahead of us, we were sure, and a few CU (cumulus clouds) were starting to go up there. Once we headed east and saw the small line starting to form, we were encouraged to see the kind of explosive convection we were longing for. One of the cells began to dominate, bubbling upward and outward in hard, white billows. Then a tower to its south began to swell, too, soon becoming a rival storm. It appeared the northern storm was splitting as we tried to reach them both from the west side, not the best way to intercept an east-moving storm. Plus, with the explosive upward development, we felt sure we would be tangling with some big hail as we tried to get through.

We stopped briefly on route 160, our road for most of the chase, and got a couple of shots of the hard anvil on the back side of the northern storm. Then we resumed our pursuit. We were starting to see storm chasers everywhere, as well as mobile Doppler radar trucks. Then, things started to get interesting. The storm to the north appeared to have some nice rotation at its base, possibly even a funnel. We heard that a storm spotter reported a tornado, though I didn’t see it. Mark and his crew dropped back to check it out. The rest of us were farther east, filming the northern storm, when I heard someone say over the scanner that there was a tornado. I was kind of puzzled, then saw the DOWs (Doppler on Wheels) and other cars screaming eastward. Dave L. turned around and saw that the storm to our south was producing a slim, white tornado.

It lasted several minutes, sending up a plume of red dust at its base. We knew we had to get east so we could catch the storm’s next cycle. Mark was unreachable by radio. There was nothing to do but go on. Dave and I went forward in my Honda Element, followed by Scott and Pete in Scott’s Nissan.

We hauled east to get into position.

It was clear immediately that we were in for some stress, to put it mildly. First, there was a core to contend with, the part of the storm that contains most of the rain and, in the big boys like this one, the hail. Over the cell phone, our nowcaster, Jason Politte, suggested the core was mostly north of the road — but he could be off by a mile or two. Oh, boy!

There was a lot of rain, at first. Then the big hail started, golf balls and baseballs. Some of the baseballs were spiky. As we came into the town of Attica, Kansas, the sirens were screaming. I was making little fearful exclamations, as mentally I was reliving the 2001 hail-trashing of my CR-V. For about a block — literally, we circled the block — we tried to find a hail shelter, then realized that with the big, black mesocyclone to our south, we almost had to go on. Either we would sit there and get trashed by hail, possibly in the path of a tornado, or we would try to get out of the “hook” of hail wrapping around the rotating meso and also try to get ahead of the meso itself.

As we came out of town, we heard Charles Edwards of Cloud 9 Tours talking about a tornado over the scanner. It soon became clear that there was a funnel, with dust on the ground, as we got to the east edge of town. Now, which way to go? If we sat on the west side of the meso, we’d be crunched by hail and even more hail as the storm moved east, possibly blocking our view, not to mention trashing our cars. We chose, perhaps a bit unwisely, to go farther east.

This was a most amazing place to be. Not everyone chooses to chase a storm on the north side of a mesocyclone, since there is often hail (and believe me, there was – it’s a miracle we didn’t lose windows or have bigger dents), blindingly intense lightning like the bolts we saw, and, to make things worse, potentially north-moving tornadoes. We stopped directly north of the bulging funnel under the meso. Dust swirled beneath it. We could actually HEAR IT. A tornado doesn’t sound like a freight train when it’s not full of debris. It sounds like a waterfall. It was quiet, and beautiful, and scary. (The tense dialogue in the video is amusing in retrospect.)

The funnel elongated, then filled in. The tornado was moving our way. We zipped east, then got out of our cars for a few minutes to film it. Baseballs were still whizzing by us now and then. I actually put on my pith helmet (I almost keep it in the car as a joke for hail — but it was no joke this time).

Suddenly, Scott shouted that the tornado, now so huge it would not fit into our video frame, was going to hit a house on the other side of the road.

 

As we faced west, the tornado crossed the road, and the house seemed to explode in the ripping winds. The roof flew off and was sucked up. Debris flew everywhere, though not near us; we were less than a mile away. All of us were filming. We zoomed in on the destruction and caught it on video. The next day, we heard no one was inside, but we have since learned the family was at home and survived in the basement. Right after it happened, Dave called Jason to have him call in the event to the Harper County emergency services as we were not in a safe position to go back. The National Weather Service later reported, “This tornado was rated as an F2 due to the complete loss of the roof, two barns being destroyed and slight realignment of the vehicles.”

The tornado continued to spin north of the road, and the baseball-size hail was catching up to us. But this was a cyclic supercell, and it was about to do it again. We chose to continue east on 160. The meso stayed south of the road. I cried out that dust was already on the ground under it, behind a row of trees. It was the start of the next tornado.

We got just north of this one, too, and parked in a tiny gravel road so that we could face it and videotape it. It formed an elegant funnel with a cloud of debris underneath, in a bright green field next to a red-earth road. It was backlit and looked almost black. It crossed some power lines, so gracefully, and suddenly, too close for comfort. We feared that it, too, would move north and on top of us. Time to move.

I turned left and sounded the alarm. A satellite tornado blocked our escape route, to the east of our cars, right on the road and coming our way! Satellite tornadoes can spin around the outside of the area of rotation and can move much faster than the main tornado. I put on the brakes, trying to figure out which way, if any, was safe to move. That tornado sort of evaporated while another satellite formed behind it, ripping into some trees, a thin but powerful swirl of red dirt. As soon as it moved off and dissipated, I hit the gas and we got the heck out of the bear’s cage.

Dave got some impressive footage of the main tornado — again, about a quarter-mile away — outside the passenger window as we sped east. Obviously, I couldn’t film that and drive at the same time. We turned north and paused to look back at the smoothly sculpted meso and tornado. The funnel was half-hidden in rain curtains. Hail fell around us, and lightning zapped nearby.

I was in full “flight” mode at this point after dodging the satellite tornadoes, but in retrospect, I wish we had stopped here a bit longer. The National Weather Service recorded F4 tornado damage just east of where we were at this moment. Though I’m not sure we would have seen the tornado even if we’d maintained a position north of it as precip got in the way and darkness encroached.

Our priority became getting out of the path. We also had to navigate out of the hail, so we headed east out of Harper. Check out this NWS photo of 5.24-inch hail from this storm!

On our way east, we saw a burning tree, the fire possibly caused by lightning. Later, we photographed lightning from a safe distance and met up with Mark’s party.

Things happened so fast, with so much adrenaline flowing, I was grateful for the video so I could review the sequence of events. And Dave made a great map reconstructing our route in conjunction with the tornadoes’ paths. The National Weather Service in Wichita documented 11 tornadoes in central Harper County on this day.

 

 

Click on any image to start a slide show. Note – in some cases these are video grabs from pre-HD video. The few slides I shot have that fuzzy retro feel partly because of the slow shutter speed. Ah, technology!

 

I have extensive archives from my early storm chasing years. I chronicled almost every day on the road, even bust days, at the old SkyDiary site, with lots of photos. In the interest of collecting everything in one place, I’m moving the highlights of the older chases – or quirky moments worth remembering – over to ChrisKridler.com. With that in mind, this post collects just a few of the accounts from 2002 and select photos to accompany them.

May 21: North Platte, Nebraska

After one real chase on a really weak storm day, I’m exhausted. There’s been way too much driving and pizza over the past few days. But at least we were chasing today, despite marginal chances and marginal storms.

The first couple of days of the trip were spent sitting around in Norman, Okla., watching storm video with other chasers, reading technical manuals so I can learn to work my gadgets, and duct-taping things, including the toy Power Ranger on the front of my car (this is his third chase season).

The weather pattern has been rotten – one forecaster says it’s the worst for storms since 1987. Early in the month, when I wasn’t here, there was a great week, and then it all went to hell. Well, finally, a big storm system is pushing out the high pressure, but the moisture hasn’t yet returned from the Gulf of Mexico, and without moisture, there are no decent storms.

I’m chasing with Dave Lewison of New York state and Bill Hark of Richmond, Va. We’ve seen lots of tacky Americana so far, including the big Indian at the Cherokee Trading Post in Oklahoma and the giant Van Gogh sunflower painting in Goodland, Kansas, a hub of the sunflower industry. It sits on a giant easel in a dusty vacant lot and is about the size of a billboard, only vertical.

Today we headed northwest out of Goodland toward our target area in eastern Wyoming. Every time we stopped to take a reading, the anemometers showed higher and higher winds – 20s, 30s, 40s, 50-plus miles per hour. It was difficult to stand against it. Our clothes whipped around us, and the car was hard to handle as gusts pushed it all over the road.

And then there was the dust. Everywhere, it poured off the fields and into the air, streaming across the road, creating a choking haze of fine silt that got into everything – our hair, ears, eyes, cameras, car, clothes. The fierce winds punctuated each gust of dust with skittering tumbleweeds that seemed to float on the fields of wheat, bouncing across the waves, and then lofting across the road, sometimes nailing the cars in the process. The Dust Bowl must have been something like this.

By the time we got into eastern Wyoming, we’d had data and phone calls from friends and fellow chasers who told us what we didn’t want to hear: There were storms where we were headed, but they were weak. On top of that, they were almost impossible to see.

We decided to intercept one. After all, we’d driven all the way to Wyoming. We were in mountain time and everything.

At last, a storm loomed out of the haze, a great, mushy monster trailing virga – rain that wasn’t hitting the ground – and the raggedy edges we call scud clouds. It was linear, not spinning, part of a long line of storms that had formed a gust front, pushing walls of dust in front of it.

We played tag with the storm, watching it spin up gustnadoes – weak tornado-like spinups on the edge of the gust front – and even being hit by some. One piece of debris took out one of my antennas. We stopped briefly to put it back up. Another peppered us with tumbleweeds.

After yet another pizza dinner with some chasers from Arkansas and south Florida, we enjoyed a lightning show while driving an enormous number of miles, still being buffeted by fierce winds. We’re in position to head east tomorrow for more chasing – and, we hope, better chasing.

May 30: Norman, Oklahoma

It’s been nine days since I’ve sent an update. This will be a more succinct summary, I hope, especially since there hasn’t been all that much fantastic weather to talk about. We’ve been driving all over creation, with not much to show for it.

On May 22, Dave Lewison of New York state, Bill Hark of Richmond, Va., and I ended up chasing storms that quickly evolved into a messy line, a story that was to repeat itself far too often. Yet, in Smith Center, Kansas, the tornado sirens went off and we saw what looked like a healthy wall cloud on the storm. We got out of the way of the supposed tornado – or tornadic circulation – but didn’t see anything too impressive.

May 23 was much better – in fact, the best chase day so far. We began the day with some good, old-fashioned Americana, the world’s largest hand-dug well in Greensburg, Kansas. Underground, there are stairs and platforms, several feet across. You can look in from ground level, outside the de rigueur gift shop. There was a honkin’ big tornado siren on top of the water tower right next to the well, and I hoped that would bode well for later in the day. The water tower was labeled, helpfully, “BIG WELL.”

By the time we checked data, we had just about given up hope. The atmosphere seemed contaminated by ongoing storms, cold and cloudy. But Bill got information after lunch that the atmosphere was clearing to the west, so we decided to play the dryline in the Texas panhandle.

On our way to the border, we stopped in Shattuck, Okla., where a mesmerizing park sprouts a number of old-time windmills, in a variety of designs. Every time the wind blows, there’s a haunting creaking and whispering from these beautiful mechanical trees, giant metal flowers that tower above the colorful wildflowers at their feet.

We noticed cloud towers starting to go up, so we broke off our tourist stop to head west. Over the border and into Texas, we waited, seeing other chasers as we went, watching the towers climb and topple until, finally, they broke through the cap. The explosion of convection was what we were waiting for, and we headed toward the storm.

It was very high-based, thanks to the lack of moisture in the air, but it was rotating. To our surprise, it put down a dusty little tornado (landspout?). As we followed it, it put down about three more (pictured). At one point, we were literally across the road from the main area of rotation as it majestically spun itself into a large, sideways funnel shape and spun apart again, not quite ready to do it. Soon after that, the storm began to die.

We were hearing reports from nowcaster Jason Politte, an Arkansas storm chaser, of a much better storm near Borger, Texas, west of Pampa. The hitch: I had to be in Oklahoma City the next morning to play airport taxi. I reluctantly agreed to go after the storm.

On the way, we saw another storm that suddenly looked very impressive, with a wall cloud that looked like it was about to put down a tornado. Indeed, it did put one down briefly, as fellow chaser Scott Blair captured on videotape … though we couldn’t really see it. As the sun set, we left that storm and headed toward the Pampa one. Once we saw it, I had no doubt we had made the right decision. It was a beautifully sculpted storm; my one regret is that there wasn’t much light left to enjoy it. In fact, Bill captured a tornado under it using the low-light setting on his video camera, but it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

The storm was sucking in 40-mile-per-hour inflow and spitting out amazing lightning. We watched it for some time, snapping pictures, before giving in to the late hour, a quick meal and a marathon drive back to Oklahoma City.

 

 

The next morning, I picked up George Jenkins at the OKC airport. He’d never been chasing before, and I was hoping to show him some “good” weather – better than what we were used to in Florida – but the pattern still wasn’t all that cooperative. On May 24, our hopes for isolated supercells were dashed as messy storms again exploded all over the Texas panhandle and eastward. We briefly chased a storm with a tornado warning on it, then found out a short tornado occurred on another storm near the town where we were staying the night. The only thing that redeemed the chase was a pretty sunset and some pouchy mammatus clouds lit orange in the twilight.

The next day, we played tourist, exploring the magnificent Palo Duro Canyon south of Amarillo and eating steak with other storm chasers at the Big Texan that night, then watching each other’s video. Some of it was Scott Blair’s latest encounter with hail. Since he was with Dave and I during the trashing of my car during a hailstorm last spring, he’s been determined to take his core-punching to the limit. A couple of days later, he would smash his windshield further by driving into spiky, baseball-size hailstones.

May 26 brought several possible target areas. We decided to play the area where the dryline was pushing into the Oklahoma panhandle and southwest Kansas, but soon after we got on the storms coming out of southeast Colorado into the Oklahoma panhandle, it was the beginning of the end of our supercell hopes. The storm was filled with the green light that often indicates hail, and its forward edge started roiling. We realized it was gusting out, or becoming an outflow-dominant storm. In other words, it would not be a sustained supercell, but a blowout with high, unidirectional winds.

We kept up with it as it kicked up massive plumes of dust and saw some fantastic gustnadoes – tornado-like circulations that often form on the edge of a storm. Some of the gustnadoes looked meatier than the tornadoes we saw a few days before. Huge, rotating bowls of dust formed on the desolate plain. One gustnado crossed the road right in front of us as tumbleweeds bounced past.

We were feeling cold outflow winds the whole time, and then, briefly, we got warm inflow, the sign that at least one part of the storm was still trying to stay alive by pulling in warm air from the east. About that time, a huge gustnado – could it have been a tornado? – spun up red dust in the field right next to us. The dust churned and rose, almost in a tube shape, to the edge of the storm clouds.

I had to split off from Dave for a day so I could take George back to the OKC airport. I was sad to see George go and also sad not to chase, but in keeping with the pattern, I didn’t miss all that much, stormwise. I was in a melancholy mood when I got to Abilene that night and met up with Dave, Bill and Jason Persoff of Jacksonville, Fla.

The four of us ended up chasing way into south Texas on May 28, maybe 50 miles from the Mexican border, and all for storms that were struggling to stay alive – though the lightning got incredibly hot and close at one point. To top things off, I hit a deer with my car – a glancing blow, but I’m sure the deer didn’t think of it that way. It shook me up as well. Fortunately, it hit the hail-dented side of my car, so it’s hard to notice the impact.

After sunset, our last storm began to weaken, but its snowy updraft – where the billowing clouds grew to meet the sky – spit out lightning as dusk fell. We ended the night joking around and looking at fireflies and the canopy of stars on the side of a rarely traveled road, among the mountains and mesas, where no artificial light polluted our view.

The storms were weak, but the universe is still spectacular. Even if we did have to eat a burger at midnight on the Interstate at Fort Stockton or go to bed hungry.

Since then it’s been goodbyes and relaxed traveling under sunny skies, hoping for the next storm system. Dave and I saw some bison today at the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge, relics of a past when there were 60 million of them roaming the Plains. Tonight, we joined the Cloud 9 Tours folks for dinner in Oklahoma City and saw the International Space Station go by overhead, a tiny dot of light. Later, a few of us went to a spot east of Norman where we could see an Iridium satellite flare at the precise time it went over our location, reflecting sunlight for one lovely moment in the dark sky.

I have another week of chasing ahead. At least, I hope it’s chasing … and not more suntan.

June 5: Paducah, Texas

This is only my third and probably my last bulletin of this year’s low-key chase in the Plains. The only big events were before I arrived, but I’m sure there will be another big one after I go home.

Still, I got to see a few fun storms, the kind I would never see in Florida, and that’s why I’m out here. I also had a couple of close encounters with hail that convinced me I’m not quite over last year’s hail attack – the one that really messed up my car. Post-hail stress syndrome. I now have some dents on the “good” side, too, but they’re more subtle.

I had a couple of down days since I last wrote. On June 1, I went to the storm-chaser party at Rocky Rascovich’s house northwest of Oklahoma City, which was fun – the usual mix of burgers and amazing storm video. The highlight (admittedly, I left early so I could do another marathon drive) was Tim Marshall’s footage of the Happy, Texas, tornado in early May. In his footage of this monster, you can see the twister ripping roofs off.

Then Scott Blair from Arkansas and I drove our cars all the way to Kearney, Nebraska, to meet up with Jason Politte, also from Arkansas. The idea was to get into position for a chase the next day, which took us up into northeast Nebraska. Though there was a small cap – the warm layer of air that can keep storms from going up – we were optimistic that if a storm did occur, it would be a monster.

The only outbreak we got was of horseshoe vortices, the little horseshoe-shaped clouds that show there’s shear in the air. And I learned to play ground curling, a game Scott & Co. have played in the dirt on roadsides while waiting for storms. It’s a little like horseshoes, but more complicated. Usually you roll rocks, but road debris was permitted. I used a most excellent giant bolt.

After that, we had to drive some more – this time to western Nebraska, to get into position for the next day’s chase in eastern Colorado.

June 3 we left North Platte, Nebraska, under the grungy, cloudy skies north of the cold front to head for Colorado. We decided to check computer data in Last Chance, where we got a snack at the Dairy King. The Dairy King is about the only thing in Last Chance, which is in the middle of some of the most desolately beautiful, empty country you’re likely to see.

After I ate some fries, I went to my car to get my computer and came back in fast. “Initiation has occurred,” I said. And how. It was a big supercell with a crisp anvil to our southwest. Jason pulled up some data on his computer with a cell modem, and I did so inside the eatery … it turns out there was already a radar-indicated tornado warning on the cell.

We headed onto some somewhat challenging dirt farm roads to get a better look at the burgeoning storm. It was attempting to form a wall cloud, and it already had pouchy mammatus clouds. We realized we’d have to get south to Limon and get gas fast if we wanted to stay ahead of the core, which clearly had some meaty hail in it.

We hauled butt south to beat the hail core – a high-adrenaline, somewhat scary drive – and as we filled up at a gas station we were blasted with wind, rain and dust as the storm began to move in. We got east on I-70 just in time and got ahead of this increasingly impressive storm.

We pulled off the interstate at Arriba, where Scott and Jason decided to go north on a farm road. I hung back, since I had a good view – and didn’t want to get that close to the hail. Charles Edwards, Jim Leonard, John Guyton and their Cloud 9 Tours folks pulled up in a few minutes, saying they’d narrowly escaped baseball- and softball-size hail, and we all watched as the storm rolled in, appearing as a massive, toothy gust front. It still had a tornado warning, but the area of rotation was not holding together very well.

Scott and Jason soon returned from their foray north, but as they tried to find hail shelter among slim pickings at Arriba, I decided to go a little further east and try my luck. In Flagler, I found the perfect thing: a tiny airport with carport-like, tin overhangs to house airplanes. I got into an empty one and waited, watching the storm’s mesocyclone start to look impressive. But I didn’t want to go after it; I wanted the hail.

I managed to contact Scott and Jason, and they happened upon me just as the storm began moving in. They barely got under the overhang as buckets of golf-ball-size hail began to drop from the sky, bouncing high and banging like gunfire on the tin roof. The noise was incredible, and the ground was soon covered. It was suddenly a winter wonderland.

The guys left a few minutes before I did. I decided to make my way down the interstate access road, which, like the interstate, was slick with hail. The land was covered in white, and hail fog seriously limited visibility. By the time I caught up with Jason and Scott again near the Kansas border, the meso was gone, and the storm had weakened considerably.

 

We headed south to Liberal, Kansas, to get into position for June 4. We picked a target around Lubbock, but storms were going up everywhere on the front as we moved south. We separated again as they chose to go first through some hail that I went through a few minutes later, and once I got out of the core, I found myself facing a storm, just to my south, with a distinctly rotating mesocyclone. A tornado warning had been issued, and I was sure this would be it. This would be the storm that would produce the big one. It appeared to have a wicked rear-flank downdraft kicking up dust, and I paralleled it east on a ranch road as it sucked in huge amounts of brown dust from the farmers’ fields.

When I got close to it, north of Idalou, I saw what I didn’t want to see – a little outflow, showing the storm was teetering. And then – tornado on the ground! Ooops. Actually, I soon realized, it was probably a gustnado, a tornado-like spinup on the leading edge of the storm, which was starting to gust out. For a few moments, it was chaotic – several fast vortices were on the ground at once, and I almost thought I had a developing tornado on my hands. But no … after filming a few impressive, persistent gustnadoes, I again met up with Scott and Jason. They had had a great view from the south of the meso with rotating swaths of dust under it.

We were about to give up on the day when one of the linear storms began to reorganize. Dave Lewison, nowcasting from home, alerted us that it might have a meso, and once we got closer, we saw it had a beautiful structure. And hail. The white curtains of hail were wrapping around the meso, which was moving east as we drove north … it was a lot like our May 30 hail encounter of last year, the one that trashed my car. “Not again!” I kept saying.

Scott was in the lead and warned us that we needed to beat it, but there was no way to do so. When the first golf balls fell, I bailed almost immediately after spotting another perfect hail shelter south of Floydada, a cotton gin with an open, high tin roof. More loud hail! There were a few golf balls, but most stones were quarter-size, and after a few minutes, I proceeded east. I got into some more hard hail, but it was small. When I got ahead of the storm, I was treated to some intense lightning. But then I got into the Caprock area, full of canyons and hills, and very low clouds began to obscure all visibility. When Scott and Jason caught up with me, we headed northeast some more, but the storm had weakened, and our chase was pretty much over.

We had a good dinner at Billie Dean’s Cafe in Matador, a great little place that’s been around for decades, then decided to hunt some lightning. Dave told us that one storm was dropping 3-inch hail. Scott, hail magnet that he is, decided he wanted to go into it. After all, most of his lights are broken, and his windshield has more cracks than the sidewalks of New York.

Jason and I got into perfect shelter under a car wash, which guaranteed that we wouldn’t get the hail core. Still, as we watched the storm approach our location in Dickens – and slip slightly north – the lightning and the sound of the wind in the wires was eerie. At times, the sound was like music, a keening wooden flute in the darkness.

Scott emerged from the core, saying, “You do not want to (mess) with this storm.” Only, he didn’t say “mess.” His car was further damaged, and the chase was over – we made it to a funky hotel in Paducah, Texas, before giving in to exhaustion.

 

July 23 and 25, 2002: Triggered lightning at Camp Blanding, Florida

At Camp Blanding, Florida, the University of Florida has a lightning research facility. There, triggered lightning is used in a variety of experiments. Small rockets are launched from tubes at the top of a tower during a storm, building up positive charge as they zoom upward and attract lightning. A trailing copper-Kevlar wire guides lightning to the ground. The wire is vaporized and return strokes resemble natural lightning enough to be used for research.

My visit on July 23 on an assignment for my newspaper produced no storms, so lightning couldn’t be triggered. Two days later, a good storm came over the site. The first lightning image is natural lightning, before triggering began.

When the negative electric field reaches the right strength, the guys in the launch trailer next to the tower press the fire button.

Here’s a succession of bolts after the rocket is launched. Note that the first bolt goes below the tower as it vaporizes the wire. The rest are return strokes. Images from video.