FCST: June 7th/8th

An active severe weather weekend is already underway across Wyoming and Nebraska with lots of photogenic storms and even tornadoes. The threat should continue for the rest of the evening as the storms are cycling nicely. Tomorrow could also be decent in Nebraska although the big issue will be the cap. However, due to work on Friday and Saturday I couldnt be out. But I got someone to cover my shift on Sunday so I will definately be out. Right now, I'd say north central Kansas or south central-southeast Nebraska. We'll see, models have been pretty inconsistent but I still think it has potential, certainly better than anything I've chased so far this year. And it looks like it could be a two day chase trip with another possible chase on Monday in Iowa. Right now I'm not overly confident as it looks like precip will be ongoing throughout the day for most of Iowa, but for now southeast Iowa has my eye. We'll see though, it'd be nice to chase two days in a row, but Monday has to look pretty good. Now the problem will be finding a chaser to head out with who hasnt already headed south since most chasers around here either already headed out or are heading out tomorrow so it doesn't sound like there will be many to meet up with on Sunday. But I'm sure I can find someone. Should be a circus down there, maybe I'll get to meet a few people while down there.

June 1st chaselog and bitching about the weather pattern

Chaselog: Outflow dominant CRAP!! I saw it coming though, the way the models broke down the CIN and the upper levels winds far away from the instability we knew better than to head out. But one of these days we will get a surprise. I took a couple pics, hardly anything worth posting. Lots of people out there though, mostly to our east in Missouri, we ended up in southeast Nebraska and even dipped down in to Kansas for a few minutes. We core punched most of the storms since there wasnt much danger in it given the setup. Got some hail, quarter size at best. The most interesting part of the day was on the way back home watching the supercells in western KS/NE. One of them was a west moving, left turning tornadic sup. The radar loop from Goodland for this event was unreal, it will definately without a doubt make a phenominal case study. Another sup to the north in NE fired, died, then reformed farther south and went on to become TOR warned (and tornadic I believe too) but unlike the storm to its southeast, this storm was moving south/southwest. Eventually something triggered more storms in the area which for a while also looked supercellular on radar. All the while a squall line was moving north towards these supercells. Eventually all the storms met and the sups got ingested in to the MCS and from the loop from GLD you could still see the motion of the sups in the MCS after they got ingested. It was friggin sweet to watch. I wonder what it would've looked like if there had been a time lapse of it all. One of the coolest things I've seen....

Anyways, the pattern the models are showing for us up here looks like complete shit, and not much rain. At this point I dont even care if we get storms, we just need some rain. Even with the active winter Minnesota had, east central MN got dryslotted with most of the winter storms which drastically cut down the amount of snow we received and with May being so dry, things are not good up here. The GFS does show some rain coming through early next week, but even still it doesnt look like much. I guess one positive is that the highs are only going to be 65-70 most days next week which should help keep the fire conditions from getting wildly out of control. Maybe its time to start chasing wild fires instead of storms for us since Minnesota is obviously not going to give us a storm season this year, and I'm sick of driving nearly all day for chases that yield low potential. Put a knife in it, storm season 2009 is a BUST!!

I may post some pics/vid from the chase on Monday, but that's a lot of work for some pics of a crappy storm.

6/1/09 Forecast/Update from the road

Heading down I35 here with Jacob T from F5 heading down towards Des Moines for now. Gonna stop off, grab some food, and look at data before making our next move. Right now anywhere south of I80 and west of I35 looks decent. Models are showing good instability but with the clouds over that area right now I think temps will stay a bit cooler, but that shouldnt be a big issue since I dont think the cap is going to be an issue today. Not gonna do a big forecast, but somewhere in southwest Iowa is our target, we'll narrow it down later. Hopefully I will have something more interesting to say or show next time I post.

Chaselog 5/20/09 North Central, Nebraska

So, where to begin? Headed out with Andy Gabrielson of Severestudios.com and Findthetornado.com. First off, MAAAD props to Andy for how well he handled the backass hillbilly slick narrow mud "dirt roads" that the Nebraska DOT for whatever reason feels the need to call "roads." I know for a fact if I had been driving we would've ended up in a ditch atleast a couple dozen times. So, thanks Andy for handling those roads like champ (and doing the majority of the driving)!! Alright, left my house at 9:00 am to get down to Andy's place in southwest Minnesota. Got down there around 1:00 pm, jumped in his car, headed west on I90 towards Plankinton, SD. We dinked around for a while driving through some corn fields Twister style. Headed south towards O'Neil, NE where we saw some turkey neck towers starting to go up (again, props to Andy for seeing them through the haze). Nearly hit the only car in the south central part of SD on a dirt road on the indian reservation. The towers tried about 5 times before they actually broke the cap and got above 20,000 ft. We got on the storm closest to us around Atchison, Nebraska and got a rotating updraft that was on the northeast side of the storm. Thanks to Brad Nelson at F5chaser.com it makes a little more sense about why the updraft was where it was. We watched the updraft for about 6 minutes, then headed east to try to reposition as the storm started to move. There must've been some boundary or stronger cap just to the east of us that killed every storm that hit it the entire night. Bailed on the first storm and headed south towards the O'Neil area as more storms were firing and we could see inflow nortches on the reflectivity. To make a very long and frustrating story short, thanks to the horrible road networks in north central Nebraska, we barely got any views of these storms. Twisting, winding, dead end dirt roads+hills=no view. We did get one quick view of a wall cloud that was near North Platte, NE that had some danglies under it but being so far away and hills in between there was no way we could tell what was happening. We continued to head towards the storm but it was getting dark and the storms were falling apart. Started heading home between 9:30 and 10:00. Headed towards Grand Island, NE in hope of finding some food but nothing worth eating was open, so we continued east on I80 towards Omaha hoping to find something good to eat. Nope, we kept going towards Sioux City, IA on I29 and finally gave in and got some McDonald's. Got back to Andy's around 5:00 am just as the sun started rising. I kept going on I90 to make it home, got home just before 10:00 am, then slept for 21 straight hours. All in all I'd say it was worth it. If we could've gotten just a little more moisture I'm sure we would've seen a tornado (or noodle as Andy would say). But we got some nice structure. Keep in mind this is the short version after we left the first storm. If you want to hear our adventures on the dirt roads in Nebraska, leave a comment. But I figure I better not get in to it since we have enough to write a fricken book. Stats: 1374 miles, 27 straight hours up, 25 of that in the car, saw the sunrise 2 days in a row, got ZERO sleep in between, no watch ever issued, but still some cool storms. Pics:


Turkey neck towers start going up:



















Towers looking better:


Towers looking more crisp:


Rotating updraft:












Storm starts dying as they hit some sort of boundary and so does the updraft, all in less than 10 minutes:



Cropped picture of the wall cloud near North Platte, NE. View is from about 12 miles away and you can see the annoying hills we had to deal with.



Click here for a time lapse of the rotating updraft!!

Chase forecast/update from the road

Left my house at 9:15 to head down towards Luverne, MN to meet up with Andy Gabrielson. Current plan is to head towards the Butte, NE area hoping for some elevated sups. The hope is starting to fade though with the new model runs, the arrowhead is starting to look better than Nebraska. But we're going to hold out hope, heading west on I90 towards the Lake Andes,SD/Butte, NE area, may try to head a bit further west but we will see. Nothing like a 1000 mile drive to a 2% TOR risk. If we get a severe storm I'll be happy, if not I wont be. Winds were a fricken pain in the ass getting down to Luverne, blowing my car all over the place. May update later once we stop otherwise I will post a recap tomorrow. May end up sleeping in the car tonight, either that or get home at 4 or 5am.

WTF is going on at Stormtrack?

Anyone else noticed the increased tension over at Stormtrack this week? For whatever reason people are being extremely anal about everything, and it only got worse with the many close tornado encounters yesterday in Missouri and Oklahoma. And to think this is happening in the heart of chase season, can you imagine what it's going to be like during the offseason?!?! We better hope for a December tornado outbreak, otherwise we going to have the Chaser Massacre of '09. I mean holy shit, I cant believe people are so uptight about some of these things. I understand people being pissed off about the infamous "Camaro Chaser" (the moron who videotaped himself driving 115 mph, and I hope you see this you SOB, you deserve the ridicule you are getting you fucking dipshit!) but even still we cant change what happened, Darwinism will take care of it, we dont need a 20 page thread going back and forth. Debate is good, but at some point (roughly after 4-5 pages) you're just beating a dead horse. The sad thing is is that we went through the exact same thing last year, and I am making a prediction right now, we will be having the EXACT SAME ISSUE AT THIS TIME NEXT YEAR. Mark my words, except the threads will be 40 pages long because John Q. Public saw another "chaser" do the same thing but this time we was killed while trying to get within a few yards of an EF5. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. I guess I dont really know what the point of this post was, except people need to lighten up. There is so much more going on this part of the year for us chasers than getting in to a 200 post bitch fest about Vortex 2, a couple of dumbasses who got too close to a tornado, or just dumb random arguments that are going on at ST right now. Come on people, just chase and dont care what other people are doing. Karma's a bitch, but its necessary. This was a really disorganized post but its just incredibly annoying seeing this crap go on.

Is it winter yet?

I mean damn, see as how Minnesota isn't going to have a storm season, it mine as well be winter so I can snowboard and play some pond hockey, it'd be a hell of a lot more fun that sitting here watching the GFS and waiting for something to finally show up. Hell, if we were lucky we might even get a snowstorm which again would be more entertaining than our current "storm" season. But maybe it's for the better for me that it's not active yet, it makes me focus a little more on the end of the year for school (kind of). But it'd still be nice to see SOMETHING that didn't completely vanish on the next run. So... given that we have had no storms its given me a lot of time to think about random stuff...The thing I've thought about the most is the Lutsen trip I went on with some friends back in January and thinking about how much I'm looking forward to next year. Ugghh, I want to be back up there. And with no storms, it mine as well be winter so that I have something to keep me busy. I do have a little hope, the 228 hour on the GFS shows some 80's creeping in to Minnesota (however without a cold front crashing through). Hoping to make it down to Kansas with Rich this season, looks like sometime around the 20th things might finally get a little more active as right now I dont see much anywhere between now and about the 20th. Lets hope something actually pans out, I'm so tired of driving a hundred or two miles to see rain and a little lightning just to patch my SDS a tiny bit. Anyways, suppose I should go study for my business final I have at 8:00 in the morning and try to get some sleep. I think Tuesday will be the first day in over week I haven't had to wake up to do something. Its gonna feel GOOOOD...Pointless post on my blog...DEAL WITH IT