Back home and reflecting on the second week of my storm chasing vacation, I’m reminded that to truly enjoy storm chasing, the objective can’t be just to see tornadoes.
Tornadoes are common but they are usually elusive and not seen by many. So managing expectations and enjoying whatever the sky presents is critical for a satisfying experience.
[Pictures from week one of the 2015 storm trip]
One of my favorite quotes is from Sean Casey, the renowned chaser of Tornado Intercept Vehicle fame, who once said: “Storm chasing is about how you handle failure.”
We grappled with failure during the second half of our trip, but as I recount and illustrate below, even days with initial failure still brought something awesome to look at.
May 29: Texas
At the end of the first post about my 2015 “chasecation” with Mark Ellinwood and James Hyde, I mentioned we’d seen big supercells and crazy sky scenes every day of the trip so far. This day, however, was an under-performer.
A morning batch of convection helped displace moisture well south. It mostly killed off the tornado threat.
May 30: Kansas
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Kansas is always a place you want to visit while storm chasing. The mile-wide wedge tornado we saw in open fields early in the trip was an easy reminder why.
But, if you’re out roaming the Plains for two weeks, it’s unlikely you’re going to have a storm threat every day. This was one of those days.
There’s lots of non-chasing weather-related activities in the quieter times if you so choose. We lucked out and were right on time for an open house of the recently-started PECAN project, a NOAA-sponsored field program to investigate nighttime thunderstorms.
May 31: Kansas/Colorado border
“Northwest flow” — or when winds aloft are coming from that direction — is notorious for creating pretty supercells. Not often the best for tornadoes, but any day with supercells has the chance of a rogue twister, so you gotta chase. Even without that isolated spinny wind, the views were incredible.
June 1: South Dakota
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As a storm chaser there are several places you’d really want to live if you don’t want to have to travel far to see good storms on a regular basis. By this time of year, one is the Denver area in Colorado, and the other is the Rapid City area in South Dakota. Both of these cities sit in regions that see supercell ingredients readily throughout early summer and both have a constant “trigger” for storm development, thanks to mountains and/or hills nearby.
[Super-still supercell seduces storm chasers in South Dakota]
South Dakota and the Black Hills really put on a show for us. The structure was amazing.
June 2: South Dakota “blue sky bust,” Nebraska redemption
While we saw storms every day there was a storm risk, the finale of the trip decided to throw curve balls left and right.
A common way to mess up storm potential in the Plains is when a “cap” of warm air forms a few thousand feet up keeping storms from growing (an updraft loves rising into cold air). It’s a conundrum. Many significant severe weather events start with a cap before ingredients become primed and the cap then breaks explosively, causing massive thunderstorms to erupt. But when the cap holds, it’s cause for storm chasers to work on their tans.
Despite the cap on this day, beautiful scenes still emerged, as a big batch of storms called a mesoscale convective system eventually formed to the west. We had dinner, waited for it to arrive, then followed it along for a bit to watch lightning. It wasn’t a lost day by any means.
June 3: Almost another blue sky bust in Wyoming
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As far as tornado probabilities go, this was looking like our best shot of the trip to catch a twister. The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) said there was 10 percent chance (which is a high number) of tornadoes in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming. In forecaster-speak, that’s a pretty darn good shot at a number of tornadoes happening.
We went with the Wyoming target because the surface winds were a little more favorable for tornado formation. Alas, storms struggled most of the day.
After more green-field viewing, a supercell — one of a few weak ones — formed about an hour and a half before sunset. Before we knew it, we were looking at mountains.
June 4: Kansas “sadness,” followed by more redemption
When chasing you always wish for the worst weather possible. You don’t want it to have negative impact on population, but you still wish for it. While most of us were piddling around Wyoming and Colorado the day before (June 3) waiting for good storms, we missed several large supercells that formed in Kansas, and a few dropped tornadoes. When huge theoretical potential appeared across Kansas the next day, it only made sense to go.
But after arriving in Kansas, storms in Colorado went nuts with one of the best chase days of the decade. Meanwhile, we watched storms struggle and ultimately mostly fail to form under the cap.
On this day in Kansas, it was an “all or nothing” situation. If the cap broke, storms would wreak havoc. If not, more sun tans. I finished the day a bit more golden.
Fortunately for us, a dry line to the west did eventually pop some storms heading into evening. The lightning eased the pain of missing what happened in Colorado.
In the end, chasing can range the gamut. Sometimes it’s basically a road-trip if you hit a terrible pattern like we did in 2011. Other times, you can hit the year’s most active two weeks of severe weather like we did in 2013. Last year, we intercepted lots of storms but no quality tornadoes.
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This year we got a little bit of everything, while we suffered some difficult moments missing what we would have liked to have seen.
We do it for the love of the storm. Those all too fleeting moments with one of the strongest forces of nature make the endless miles, gut-tangling food, and questionable hotels worth it. Coming back exhausted, you can’t help but already start yearning for the next adventure.
FYI, I’ll be continuing to add more photos to my Flickr set on this year’s chase trip over the time ahead.
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