Day 10: A Ticket, Hail, Tornado, and RAGE

Yesterday's chase day was intense. We experienced softball sized hail, tornadic circulation at close range, and some ugliness on the part of other "chasers."

We headed Northwest to O'Neill, Nebraska from Omaha. I was driving and cruising along at 80 MPH when I was pulled over for speeding. Sigh. Into the glove compartment with the other ticket. It's part of the cost of chasing, I suppose. 

We finally get into O'Neill and continue northwest into Atkinson. We weren't hopeful because the storms started off looking like they were going to merge into a squall line almost immediately. That didn't happen and a couple of them began to look like messy supercells. We stopped to take a bunch of photos and video, but when we started getting hit by cold outflow instead of warm inflow we decided to leave that storm, let it go past us, and wait for the next one.

As we're driving down this narrow country rode toward Highway 11 at a decent speed (though nothing excessive), I see a GIANT hailstone hit the road in front of me and explode into a zillion pieces. I say, "uh, was that hail?" Keith says, "I suppose it could have been," as we both see another GIANT hailstone hit a pond and produce a splash that went at least 3 feet in the air.

Oh shit.

I start flying down the road and huge hail is falling all around us. I just want to get the hell out.

But I can't.

I can't because Sean Casey and the TIV and the Discovery Channel Crew are blocking the whole road. They refuse to let me pass because (I assume) that it will ruin their shot. When I finally get around one of  them, they come flying up behind me flashing their lights and freaking out and generally trying to run us off the road. By this point everyone in the car is screaming obscenities, I'm leaning on the horn, and we all want to KILL the discovery channel fuckers.

As we finally make it to the intersection of Highway 11 and Highway 20, the TIV and crew are blocking the intersection. Large hail is still falling around us. I say "fuck it" and go around them on the grass. They get so pissed off that one of the Discovery film crews nearly drives right into the TIV. It would have been poetic justice.

Hail is still falling all around us so we decide to take cover. The only place we could find was a under a tree on someone's front lawn. It was our only option. I would have driven right into a random person's garage had it been open. This hail was huge.

Once the hail danger passed, we decided to head back into town to see what was coming next.

We decide to go after the next cell in the line and take this road that appeared paved on the map. It would have been fantastic, except the pavement ended. I had to drive us on muddy, rutted, dirt roads as a rotating supercell heads our way. Dave and Keith tell me to turn left, and as I do, we all see a disorganized tornadic circulation kicking up dust right in front of us. 

 We backtrack and get the hell out. 

At that point the storm began to lose strength and show signs of becoming outflow dominant. We decided to let it get away from us and shoot pictures of the outflow sky. It was really incredible. 

All in all, this was one of the tougher and more stressful chases that I've had. 

Days 5-7: Goodbye and Bust

I don't have much to say here. We haven't seen a storm cloud in days. It's been pretty rough. There's been a whole lot of staring at the sky while parked at various gas stations around Oklahoma and Kansas.

I said goodbye to Ellie and Ella yesterday. Sadness. I love my girls.

 While waiting for storms to initiate we were parked outside of a gas station in Arkansas City, KS. People were working on the roof of a house across the street. The entire family was sitting in this truck for hours watching what was happening. At one point it looked like the mother and son were having this serious conversation on the back of the truck so I snapped a picture. It tells a story.

Days 4-5: Down Days and the Flint Hills

After the intense storms earlier in the week, the moisture was scoured from the plains and storms were unable to initiate in the drier air.

We were all sick of being in the lovely state of Oklahoma, so we decided to take a trip north to the Flint Hills of Kansas, one of my favorite landscapes in the country.

One of the things that I have discovered as a result of chasing for the past three years is an intense love for the Great Plains of the United States. There's something truly magical about golden wheat swaying in the wind backed by either a bright blue sky or intense dark storm clouds. There are so many people who believe that the Plains are a featureless landscape of flat corn and wheat fields. They couldn't be more wrong.

The Flint Hills are an area that spans from Eastern Kansas into Eastern Oklahoma. The rolling hills and green grasses look like an expanse of lush green velvet from a distance. If I could transplant this landscape closer to the ocean, I'd live there in a second.

We visited the Tall Grass Prairie National Grasslands and decided to take a short hike through the grass. It was beautiful. I took a bunch of photos, most of them I don't love. Ella and Ellie did yoga on a bridge that goes over  a small creek. Porthos tried to hide from the sun.

After our hike we sat on the porch of this mansion that's in the grasslands for awhile just looking at the prairies and watching the bluebirds dart around. Porthos was finally starting to cool off. What a pretty boy.

Day 4: A Stressful Day of Chasing

Yesterday, May 24th, was a "High Risk" day in Oklahoma.

To the people who live in the area, it's time to hunker down and prepare for the worst. For those of us who are fascinated with the violent beauty that mother nature can display, it's incredibly exhilarating and exciting. Because a high risk day offers the promise of violent tornados, more storm chasers than usual are out and about, clogging the roads and committing general ass-hattery.

In order to avoid the hordes, and because Dave felt it would give us the best shot of seeing a tornado, we headed north and west of Oklahoma City.

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. Storms went up to our south and produced large, violent tornados in populated areas. Normally, we would have been able to get to them, but they very quickly morphed into a line of embedded high precipitation (HP) supercells so we couldn't find a good way to view any possible tornadic activity. Also, the storms were moving east at  50-60 mph and we were trying to stay out in front of it because we did NOT want to get rolled by a big fat tornado.

We began stair-stepping south and then east looking for a break in the storms so we could punch our way through the line and get west of the storms without getting hit by the core. Every single time we got far enough south, the storms had already caught up and we were no longer far enough east. It was incredibly frustrating and incredibly stressful. The driving was exhausting. I was pushing myself and the car as hard as I could, but it was fruitless and futile.

We finally were able to get to a break in the storms, but the storm to our south was moving so rapidly that while we were driving between the two supercells, we got hit by the rain core of the one to our south. The driving became hectic, stressful, and at one point, downright scary. Although Dave didn't tell us at the time, I knew that I was looking at atomized rain spinning around the car. The wind was shifting in all different directions and I was sure that we were driving underneath a rotating meso. Eventually we just stopped and let the storms pass over us.

We'd lost our shot to see a tornado, but we were safe.

We decided to head back down to Norman, OK and spend the night in a hotel. We were pretty bummed that we'd missed storms like this one, many chasers had the same issues we did.

On our way back to Norman we stopped at an intersection to figure stuff out. There was this abandoned building on the corner with the sun setting behind it. It was incredible so I decided to snap a few pictures. 

Only one was decent, but it made the whole day worthwhile. 

Day 3: A Brief Tornado and Some Beautiful Structure

Yesterday we headed northwest into the Plains of Oklahoma (finally!). We started chasing a cell near Watonga, OK that had beautiful structure early on. The RFD caused a clear slot in the clouds that looked like a hole into sunshine.

Ella thought it was pretty too.

We headed closer to the storm to get a better view and mother nature was kind enough to provide us with a brief tornado. It was really interesting because there was this skinny horizontal funnel cloud that had a debris cloud that was pretty far displaced from the funnel itself. This is caused by the RFD pushing the debris cloud away from the funnel itself. It was a very brief, weak tornado, but a tornado nonetheless. 

As the storm was dissipating, created this beautiful scene

Once that storm died, another storm began going up right in front of us. We started heading southeast to get to a different cell, but the incredible convective motion of the closer storm was too hard to ignore so we stayed on it. It was spectacular.

Day 2: Busted

On our second day out chasing we decided to head northeast out of Norman toward the Ada, OK area. It wasn't the best area to see storms, but the better area was in rough terrain near the Oklahoma-Missouri border. It's really tough to chase there because of all of the trees and hills. When you have trees and hills it makes it very difficult to see the storms so we avoid chasing those areas as much as possible. The Joplin, MO tornado was in that type of terrain so we were nowhere near that area. My heart goes out to the people of Joplin.

Day 1: Not a bad first day

We arrived in Norman, Oklahoma at Roger and Elke's late Friday night after picking Ellie up at the airport. At that point we assumed we would have to travel a few hours on Saturday to find supercells, but no one was hopeful that we'd see anything.

On Saturday morning we woke up to have breakfast with my friend Amanda, who lives in Oklahoma City. After an awesome breakfast we headed back to the house and found out that Dave and Roger had done some forecasting and determined that our best shot for storms would be north central Texas. Our target city was Gainesville, just over the border of Texas from Oklahoma.

Storms were popping up south of us, Near Waco, but we knew that there was no way we could make it that far south so we decided to sit tight and wait. As we watched tornado reports and warnings show up for those storms we started getting a little disappointed, but remained hopeful.

At about 4:30pm clouds started forming to our northeast, so we decided to head back in that direction. As we made our way to the brewing thunderstorm Ellie and Ella began to get excited about what the evening hours held in store for us. We watched the clouds get bigger and taller. As we approached the storm it became a supercell.

We then watched as one brief tornado touched down after another. They were mostly wispy little things that only stayed on the ground for a moment.

And then we hit the jackpot. The entire storm was spinning like a top. The mesocyclone was spinning so fast it was like a merry-go-round. And then, there was a multiple vortex tornado on the ground. The vortices were dancing around each other. It was other-worldly. 

All in all, it was a spectacular first chase day. Roger had his first ever birthday tornado. Ellie and Ella saw their first ever tornadoes. We had reasonable road options. And we got to see the storm from it's birth as towering clouds all the way to the end of the cell as it was ingested into the storm to its north. 

Truly a great first day out on the plains.