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My friend Steve Sponsler spotted this video on YouTube. Give it a minute. The tornado emerges between the buildings, and its power and speed are incredible. I’m not just talking about the wind speed … the land speed is stunning. This thing was racing across the city.

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 edited journals and highlights of the older chases to ChrisKridler.com, with select photos to accompany them. Dates in the subheads are the dates of journal entries, not necessarily events.

The highlight of this account is the May 12 hail barrage and tornado at South Plains, Texas.

May 6: Colby, Kansas

It’s been a long day, and tomorrow there’s a long drive ahead, so I’ll make this short. I drove west this afternoon from Hays to Goodland, Kansas, to get some data. My initial target was southwest Nebraska, with the thought that storms might form in eastern Colorado, just west of Goodland, and move northeast. It turns out the dryline was right there, and a few cumulus clouds were starting to bubble. The one that bubbled the most ended up being the storm I chased all day, right out of Goodland and up into Nebraska. It didn’t move fast, and despite wall clouds and a tornado warning, I didn’t see a tornado – though I did see a very well-formed scudnado (looks like one, but isn’t) that fooled me for a minute. Maybe someone in another position did see one, but the storm was rolling over a terrible road network, and I spent a lot of the day trying to pick the least muddy gravel road to traverse.

The best part of the day may have been the sunset, which shot yellow light over the rolling hills at the Kansas-Nebraska border and pulled a brilliant double rainbow out of the rain in the eastern sky, the full arch. Fantastic.

May 9: Manhattan, Kansas

It’s a quiet day in Kansas after a couple of fun storm chases. The night of May 6, I met up with the crew I chased with last year (Scott McPartland, Pete Ventre and Dave Lewison; and Mark Robinson, Dave Sills and a Toronto Star reporter), and on May 7, we set out for Kearney, Nebraska (joined by Dave Patrick and Kristy Randall of Ontario). That was our initial target, anyway.

We were almost there when storms started going off on the dryline to our west. We turned around and cruised back down the Interstate to intercept as the cells hauled north. They were pretty, even tornado-warned, but we didn’t see any tornadoes. By this time, cells were blossoming to our east, and back we went again, toward our original target in the better air, caught at one railroad crossing after another. Just west of Kearney, after another train went by, we made a right turn and saw a big, dark lowering under a tornado-warned cell. I was on the phone with hubby George at the time. “I have to call you back!” I said. We had a four-car caravan, and everyone figured we saw a tornaodo. Subsequent reviews of the tape and other reports appear to confirm it — but if you have to think about it too much, it wasn’t that great of a sighting.

The day actually got better from there. North of Grand Island, there was redevelopment on the back end of the storm, and we caught some pretty towers going up with scudding clouds in the inflow that the inexperienced might call a funnel. Meanwhile, there were plenty of the inexperienced around. All the locals were out for a chase. While we were filming the cell, a guy in a truck stopped in the middle of the road to tell us he’d just filmed a 20-minute tornado.

“Want to see it?” he said. “Not right now,” we told him. Um, we’re kinda busy, you know? Meanwhile, Mark Robinson’s car is a magnet for yahoos. It’s got about a zillion antennas, an anemometer, flashing lights, glaring decals. Scott McPartland’s car isn’t quite as obvious, but it also has a lot of gear on the roof and decals, along with a hail shield that Dave Lewison helped him build. Dave Patrick’s truck also has gear and a big lightning picture in the back window. So cars were following us all day … even into the network of muddy farm roads we then entered.

The roads were gravel and dirt, not too bad before it rained. But cells were passing through the area, including the ones we were chasing. We stopped on a hill and filmed a pretty orange sunset and a cell carved out by a rear-flank downdraft. Again, no tornado. I guess it was boring for the tagalongs as we hung out and took pictures, so they took off. I suggested we get moving before it got dark, because my Honda Element wasn’t thrilled with the roads.

As we got going, dusk was falling, and a new line of storms was headed for us. I noticed a young man walking along the road. He had a desperate expression and appeared to try to flag me down. I radioed Mark, who said they’d seen him, too. We decided to stop and see if we could help.

May I just say, “Duh.” This was a carload of Grand Island locals, five young guys, who said they were following the storm and got lost. No, they were following US and got lost – and then slid their car into a ditch. We couldn’t even drive down the road they went down. A few of our guys walked into the lowering darkness to see if they could help push it out. They tried, unsuccessfully, while the cells got closer. Dave L.’s WxWorx satellite data showed “shear markers” in the storms, signs of rotation.

“We have to go NOW!” half our crew was shouting to the other half, who were down the hill in the dark, trying to get the car out. We ended up rearranging our passengers and carrying the five guys to the nearest town, Fullerton. Their car was left behind. Wicked storms trained over that area all evening … the car was probably door-deep in mud by the time it was over. We didn’t go back to find out.

South of Fullerton, we stopped and enjoyed a fantastic, strobing lightning show from the line of storms. It was like flash bulbs constantly going off, little sparks shooting through the clouds. We took lots of pictures and video, including shots of each other in front of the light show, a prairie Vegas.

May 8, we started out in Grand Island and headed east and south. We saw lots of storms, but nothing significant, except for a brief, well-formed funnel south of Washington, Kansas.

When it all merged into a fast-moving line, we got ahead enough to enjoy the “whale’s mouth” appearance, a roiling cathedral ceiling tumbling over itself, glowing with blue light. Then, for once, we had a relatively early night and grazed at the Sirloin Stockade in Manhattan, Kansas, for dinner.

Things should pick up tomorrow and might be really interesting Wednesday. It’s a matter of powerful dynamics coming together in a favorable way. Today, well, we might go see that crazy big ball of twine again.

 

 

May 13: Amarillo, Texas

Amarillo, Texas, is where I’m holed up while Band-Aids are put on my car after a good thrashing by hail yesterday (May 12). But let me backtrack a bit.

I was going to tell you about our stop in Cawker City, Kansas, a few days ago, when we actually got to add twine to the world’s largest ball of twine. Yes, the twine I added is now part of history, and I was pretty giddy with the excitement! And then I was going to tell you about a couple of subsequent chases … a powerful supercell in Nebraska that came painfully close to producing a tornado, but was mostly a fest of dusty spinups before becoming a stacked-plate behemoth after dark; and a frustrating Kansas chase that left us behind the storms in Nebraska and too far ahead of them in southwest Kansas – a day redeemed only by some nice lightning.

But instead of going on about all that, I’ll tell you about May 12.

 

Highway to hail, 2005 edition

The May 12 South Plains tornado and hail barrage

May 12 is turning out to be a pretty significant day for me. Last year, I was with Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland and Pete Ventre that day, just east of the house destroyed by a tornado in Attica, Kansas. This year, I was with them, and Dave Patrick and Kristy Randall, in the Texas panhandle when everything went crazy. (Mark Robinson and Dave Sills had decided to chase in Kansas on their way home to Ontario.)

We started the day in Garden City, Kansas (where I stayed in the Best Western’s Presidential Suite for the single rate – Jacuzzi and everything!), and even though we knew we had what could be an impossible drive ahead of us, we decided Lubbock, Texas, was a good target. If anything went up along the front along the way, we could consider going after it.

It’s almost a magical feeling, coming out from under the cold side of a weather front. Most of us don’t think about that kind of thing in our everyday lives, but when you know that there’s a boundary between two air masses, and you drive hundreds of miles to get from one side to the other, you’re very conscious of the vast changes going on around you. First, it was cloudy and cold, then eerily foggy. Then, it was suddenly warmer, with clearer skies above, and we saw the anvil of a tasty storm coming out of Plainview. Dave L. was able to track its growth using the WxWorx system that draws radar data from the XM satellites.

At a gas station, we ran into Tim Samaras and his pumped-up truck, loaded with off-road gear from a corporate sponsor. Some of you might have seen Tim featured on “National Geographic.” He’s a very nice guy. We said hello, and he told us to be careful. I think of that with irony now. (Of course, Tim deploys probes in the paths of tornadoes.)

So we got into the Panhandle, into the blocky, hilly geography of the Caprock, then west into the flatter areas of Quitaque and Silverton, and went south on 207. The first storm looked pretty good, and it formed a spinning wall cloud and rear-flank downdraft and looked like it was about to produce a tornado. It didn’t, but it was dropping baseball-size hail on chasers who tried to get north of it.

We decided to chase the southern storm, which looked promising visually and on radar. It followed about the same path. We went down a muddy farm road a little ways, but not far enough to get into trouble, and watched it evolve. This one’s downdraft kicked up dust, including distinct tornado-like spinups, and its wall cloud had some serious rotation. Our party was separated by a short distance on the farm road, but we all headed out toward the paved north-south road at about the same time to stay ahead of it.
As I started to drive south a bit farther, hoping to get south of it, it began to form a funnel.

Like almost everyone else – and there were a lot of chasers around, including tour groups – I pulled off to get some video and pictures. I realized there was big hail somewhere in there, but I also realized that I didn’t want to cross the road in front of it. There are a lot of “ifs” you consider later – if I’d kept going, I might have avoided the big hail, though I’d have no tornado video. Or if I’d kept going, I might have been munched by a huge tornado. In all, taking chances with the hail is probably smarter, though not much. (I suppose staying home is smartest.)

 

Anyway, the tornado formed a beautiful white cone with a brown debris cloud flying around its base. It thickened, with condensation swirling in spirals around it, then darkened and grew as it got closer to the road.

It crossed, with a huge, dusty circulation under the dark cylinder of the tornado. Dave L. warned over the radio from Scott’s car that we had to get out of there to avoid the big hail. But there was a big problem: The tornado had felled power poles, which were lying across the road. There might have been a way to squeak around, but by then we were in serious wind, rain and hail on the outer edges of the circulation, and then the big stuff started falling.)

This was one of those “lie back and think of England” moments, when you just have to resign yourself to the ravishing to follow. It’s like what they say about people on airplanes who know they’re going to crash – they don’t generally panic. And I had been through something like this before, in 2001. I naively thought this couldn’t get much worse.

It was. In 2001, my CR-V was hit by mostly golf balls and a few baseballs. This was mostly baseballs and a few softballs and grapefruits. It sounded like bowling balls were slamming into my roof. With some of those impacts, the entire car shook and the covers on my ceiling lights actually fell off. I was starting to worry that stones were going to come through.

My windshield was whacked multiple times, with each impact creating a spectacular spider-web smash. A few little bits of glass fell onto the dash, but it held. Then I noticed I was getting hit by tiny bits of hail and rain. I couldn’t figure it out. Then I looked back. The side window in the back on my side was smashed in. I climbed back and stuffed a pillow in the hole to keep the worst of the stuff out. When the worst seemed to be over, we picked our way around the fallen power poles and headed south to get out of the precipitation and assess the damage. (And my pillow was lost along the way. I loved that pillow.)

So, in brief, the damage was … the two windows; a smashed-out taillight; huge dents that look like the product of a beating with a baseball bat; cracked plastic here and there; and my wounded psyche. At least that metal hail shield I’d ordered built for the sunroof was rock-solid. I can’t even imagine being in a storm like that with an unprotected glass sunroof. My car really would have been a hail-catcher (I talk about turning it into one sometimes; I’d have to armor it first).

 

One of Scott’s hail shields flew off. He had them for every window, but he lost a side window because he lost the shield. The chicken-wire hail shield he and Dave L. built to hang over the windshield preserved the window but had huge, bowl-like indentations in it from the hail strikes. Scott’s car also had body damage. So did Dave Patrick’s truck, and his windshield was hosed, too.

A lot of other chasers were caught. We ran into Cloud 9 Tours afterward. One of their side windows was blown out.

“Was there screaming in the van?” I asked.

“I was screaming,” a tourist from Liverpool said.

I don’t blame him.

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!