As it got darker, the colors shifted.
Instead, there were many storms growing and dying in rapid succession, but it was still a great photography day, with wildflowers, storm structure, mammatus and a wonderful sunset.
Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.
I separated from the group, hoping to escape the rain, and stopped on the bridge to check out the circulation. Whoa! A huge cone on the ground!
Incredibly, the storms not only went up there, but one tornado-producing storm there barely moved all day. At one point we just set up and watched it spin out one funnel after another.
But the main show was the large tornado, which we all filmed from different angles. I watched it from the highway bridge over the river, filming the tornado as it churned beyond the wagon bridge that had always captivated my imagination in spite of its sometimes gloomy history. Unfortunately, the twister reportedly caused injuries.
Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.
The group was happy after seeing a tornado in open country – the best kind.
I chased with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter and Brad and Dayna Rousseau. We targeted the Lubbock area and ended up moving a little east to intercept a small line of storms. The southern one surprised us by producing a classic tornado despite a relatively weak storm that was nothing special on radar.
Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.
I followed storms east in the Oklahoma Panhandle to be treated to a great rainbow and mammatus. This is “The Rainbow and I,” with my shadow.
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The hail core on this storm was beautifully green.
Roll over each image to see the caption and the story of the chase, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.
Here’s the shelf cloud as it appeared to the southwest.
On June 5, 2014, I started my day in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and decided to target southeast Colorado. This would be my last day of chasing in Tornado Alley for this season.
I made a stop in Limon, running into Charles Edwards of Cloud 9 Tours, and evaluated data before committing to the target. The first storm I chased was near the southernmost town in Colorado, Branson.
The severe storms led me into the dramatic topography of northeastern New Mexico and then the Texas Panhandle, when lightning lured me to pause during my all-night drive, as I was starting my trip home to the east coast.
I was especially delighted to get shots of a storm looming over the Route 66 landmark U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. The beautiful wee-hours storms were a satisfying way to end a trip of meager setups and an insane amount of driving.
Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.
On May 26, 2014, Peggy Willenberg and I hopped east to Stanton, Texas, from our starting point in Midland to keep an eye on developing storms.
We ran into friends there, including Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland, Robert Balogh, John Mann, Anemometer Steve Barabas, and The Weather Network’s Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal and Michel Millaire, whom we met on and off all day.
What a swoosh in this storm!
We targeted a storm to the northwest and chased it for a while, then switched to a storm developing behind it. It was a day of stunning structure and rotating features, some of them dusty, and while many of these spinups were reported as tornadoes, we didn’t see any tornado I’d hang on the wall of fame.
Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.
Lightning May 12, 2009, in Childress, Texas.
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 2009 and select photos to accompany them.
May 2, 2009: I began my trip to the Plains to chase storms, never dreaming I’d actually be chasing on Day One during my long drive from Florida. I saw a couple of tornado-warned storms in Mississippi, but no tornadoes. I drove over 900 miles on this day, and a ridiculous number of hours after leaving home at 5:30 a.m. EDT.
May 3, 2009: I woke up in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 3 to the first wave of squalls hammering the hotel. After a snooze, I got up about an hour later and saw a huge bow heading our way on the radar. I was out of the hotel by 9 a.m. and heading south on I-55. It looked like a cell was forming ahead of the line. I dropped south, then, trying to intercept the tornado-warned advance cell, made a problematic decision to take a tiny, windy road northwest into what was essentially a forest.
I started to make my way toward a main road and saw lots of branches and some trees down. This was in a rural area west of Hazelhurst. I was so close to the main road when … yep, a tree down, blocking my way. I thought that might happen. Here I am checking out the fallen tree. My superpowers failed to manifest, so I had to leave it, turn around and find another way out. I gave up the chase and headed west.
May 5, 2009: My initial target was somewhere between Abilene and Seymour, Texas, where the dryline push and warm front were likely to intersect and where upper-level winds would enhance storms. I would refine that forecast on the road. I left Amarillo in the mist and cold and, after a data stop in Childress, I dropped south.
I found the Cloud 9 Tours group in Aspermont, so I goofed around with them for a while as I kept an eye on the clearing satellite picture. I left the Cloud 9 folks because I wanted to get a little southeast, where the forecast suggested storms might fire, and near the field of cumulus clouds near the warm front. This is east of Anson. At first, they weren’t much to look at. Soon, the clouds starting percolating in the afternoon heat and began to form a nascent storm, here seen from a picnic area that overlooks Hubbard Creek Reservoir, west of Breckenridge. From Breckenridge, the tower looked solid. At this time, I began to see massive chaser caravans.
Here’s a view of the base, as seen from Breckenridge.
Though the storm became disorganized, the towers at its southwest end began building and dominating. This is just east of Breckenridge. I ran into the Cloud 9 group again. We were among dozens of chasers (at least) who were following the storm.
I repositioned and got a nice view of a wall cloud forming. It began rotating as small hail began falling around me. Driving through the hail was stressful, but I stayed ahead of the bigger stones, despite a lot of banging on the car. The reward: this beautiful rotating wall cloud crossing Interstate 20 at Route 16.
The rotation made it seem likely a tornado was imminent.
Driving through the hail was stressful, but I stayed ahead of the bigger stones, despite a lot of banging on the car. The reward: this beautiful rotating wall cloud crossing Interstate 20 at Route 16.
The National Weather Service cited a preliminary storm report of grapefruit-size hail – 5 inches across – with this storm, just north of our location, and it was moving southeast. I bailed and took shelter, but I missed the worst of the core. A baseball-size stone cracked John Guyton’s windshield. Meanwhile, I got a few shots of the retreating storm and the rising moon.
May 8, 2009: Most of today was frustrating. I began the day in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and decided the front and the monster convective potential suggested southeast Oklahoma might be the place to catch storms today, or somewhere along the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas. I made the long drive down to Durant, Oklahoma, on the border, had a late lunch and pondered my options. I decided I needed to get a little west, closer to the front, and also wanted to keep an eye on a line of cumulus clouds developing in clearer air in Texas. Those started to pop, and I made the decision to go south. A while later, I decided I didn’t want to bother with those south-moving hailers, especially because it might take a while to catch them – yet a tornado was reported from one of them in Early, later. Meanwhile, a line of storms was going up to my west, so I checked them out. The result was beautiful.
Storm on fire!
May 12, 2009: What a crazy drive today. I started in Woodward, Oklahoma, and at first thought about an Oklahoma panhandle target. But as the day wore on, the models’ meager forecast of precipitation there evaporated, and it seemed like the southwest Texas panhandle would be more likely. Thanks to Steve Sponsler for data updates.
Though it looked ominous, the storm appeared linear and unlikely to produce a tornado.
More flowers and another rainbow near Estelline, Texas.
A rainbow closeup.
Mammatus and lightning northwest of Childress.
Lightning over Childress.
Instead of watching this pretty thing, I probably should have been driving east and getting ahead of the storm…
May 15, 2009: It seemed clear that there would be storms today, and that they would likely develop rapidly into a squall line once they fired. I thought about a couple of possible targets – the Texas panhandle, where storms could be more isolated on the dryline, and the Kansas-Oklahoma border near Alva, which was not an unreasonable drive (always a consideration) and also had enough upper-level support and huge convective potential to make me think something interesting might happen there. Eventually, there was a tornado reported in the panhandle, but I had cast my luck with northern Oklahoma.
Beams of light and pretty convection.
Sweeping in.
Looking to the north.
May 26, 2009: Florida is king of the shelf clouds. Here’s a beautiful layered gust front approaching the Brevard County coast from the west.
The shelf cloud looms.
Beautiful layers appeared in the shelf cloud.
June 22, 2009: After days of unusually high temperatures of high 90s in the shade, the Storm Prediction Center put Brevard County, Florida, in a severe thunderstorm watch this evening. Storms broke late and brought with them nice lightning as they moved in fast from the north.
Lightning shot from Cocoa Beach, looking west, on June 22, 2009.
July 24, 2009: The evening began with a farewell to my husband’s brother – a memorial at Lone Cabbage Fish Camp in Cocoa, Florida. Then the skies opened. I had my camera, so when the gathering was over, I sought out the storm. This was one of the best nights I’ve seen for lightning in a long time here.
The storm cluster became more vigorous as it slowly edged closer, as seen over the St. John’s River.
The sunset and storms provided a classic Florida scene as this airboat tried to get going at the Lone Cabbage Fish Camp.
More bolts spring from the approaching storm.
I love the reflection of the lightning in the water. I think this is my favorite photo from this stage of the evening. This is full-frame, not cropped.
More great color and light – crawler above, traffic below.
These just seemed to rip across the sky.
August 22, 2009: Hurricane Bill took pity on Florida and swept on by, but it delivered a boon to surfers in the form of big waves. Here are some shots on a beautiful beach day at the south end of Patrick Air Force Base (Satellite Beach).
Whipped cream and emerald frenzy.
In the tube!
The arc.
Taking off.
Airborne!
December 14, 2009: A fog event right out of a science-fiction movie rolled into Brevard County on Dec. 14. When I drove to the barrier island in the late afternoon, the fog seemed to be enveloping only the beach communities. Then it moved inland. I got just a few photos in Cocoa Village of the Christmas lights in the fog.
Line of storms near Abilene, Texas, on May 8, 2007.
The 2003 Element hit 100,000 miles on May 3, 2007.
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.
We missed the Oklahoma tornadoes and saw this in the distance en route – would we have seen the Greensburg tornado if we’d pursued these cells? Maybe not, since it hit in the night.
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.
Sunset storm.
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.
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.
Storm with wall cloud.
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.
Faint lightning pops behind the U Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas, May 6, 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.
Squall line in Texas.
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.
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.
Shelf cloud on May 9.
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.
Goodbye, Tornado Alley.
Atmospherics at the windmill park at Shattuck, Oklahoma, on May 23, 2002.
Chasers (from left) Dave Lewison, Mark Robinson and Bill Hark looked over Jim Leonard’s shoulder as he checked data on the Internet on May 19, 2002.
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.
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.
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 storm near Borger and west of Pampa, Texas, had a significant wall cloud. The storm assumed an amazing structure as darkness fell as it spat out lightning.
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.
W
e 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.
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.
Hail core on June 3.
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.
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.
