Eric's Storm Chase Log

Home

Chase Days:

June 16
June 13
June 12
June 11
June 10
June 9***
June 8
June 7
June 6
June 5
June 4
June 3
June 2
June 1
May 31
May 28
May 25
May 18
May 12*
May 11
May 10
May 8
May 7
April 25
April 21
April 5
March 21*

* = tornado(s)

(See also Nic Wilson's accounts at his website)

More descriptions to be completed after I get back from Alaska!!

Click for photos:

June 16th - Norman, OK----------Intense gust front and outflow boundary... 50+mph winds, PDS Severe Thunderstorm watch!

June 13th - Lake Thunderbird, OK----------Embedded supercells, created lots of rain and not much else.

June 12th - Hamlin, TX----------Loooong day chase to just about 40 miles north of Abilene, TX... radar problems prevented us from seeing a few short lived tornadoes.

June 11th - Wichita, KS----------Returned the rental car to the airport.

June 10th - Hays, KS to Norman, OK----------Made our way back home to Norman FINALLY after 5 days on the road.

June 9th - Hill City/Damar, KS----------Woke up at my sister's house in Wichita, Robin and I stayed there to avoid going all the way back to Norman with Chad and the W-band. It was a good thing too, because we had extra time to go and rent a car from Enterprise at the Wichita airport. Click the link to see photos and a description of the day.

June 8th - Columbus, NE to Wichita, KS----------Pat at the repair shop (Performance Paint and Body, 2119 13th Street... HIGHLY recommended next time you're in Columbus) overnighted parts from Kansas City to get the radiator of the W-band repaired, X-band on to Grand Island, NE to position for June 9th, W-band back to Norman, and Massachusetts.

June 7th - Columbus, NE----------W-band wreck... wet roads + stoplight at the bottom of a hill = W-band and X-band making a Cadillac Escalade sandwich... X-band generator into the transmission case of the Escalade, W-band radiator through the back window. W-band generator moved to X-band, modified X-band crew (Robin, Mike, Kery) continued up to western South Dakota and intercepted a very beautiful LP supercell as it interacted with a squall line. Chad and I stayed in Columbus and fixed the W-band.

June 6th - York, NE----------The combination of a forecasted northern track for the next several days, and climatology signalling the approaching end of the (record-setting UNactive) season led Howie and Kathleen to make their yearly pilgrammage to Boulder, CO for the summer, and the UMass radar crews to embark on a "pack-for-10-days" journey to the northern plains. June 6th was spent pre-positioning to York, NE for an initial target of Mitchell, SD the next day. The highlight for me was that I got to meet my sister and her fiance at a gas station in Park City, KS to say hi and show off the radars. =)

June 5th - Snyder, OK----------To recover from the High Risk quasi-bust from the night before, Howie decided to let us all have the day off. The cap was pretty strong anyway, and no storms were really expected. Went to church at 11am, took a nap afterwards, played some sand volleyball from 3-6, and was getting ready to hop in the pool when I got a call from Robin saying there was a supercell two counties away, and Howie wanted to go take a look. Meet at Howie's in 15 minutes. So, we booked it down I-44 at cut west at Chickasha to intercept the storm we thought was moving NE at 15mph... turns out that it began backbuilding, and remained pretty much stationary throughout the entire evening. So due to some old data, we ended up taking about a 45 min detour off of I-44, and arrived at the storm 50 min after it spawned a brief tornado (do the math). I did, however, have an exciting time navagating us through the intense rain core of the solitary VERY HP supercell. We got to Snyder as it looked like the apocalypse was imminent... very frequent lightning, and very green sky welcomed us. We stopped 3 miles south of town to set up and scan a rapidly rotating wall cloud, but had to keep moving to get out of the rain that was being wrapped around the meso. Turns out that even that little bit of rain was enough to attenuate the W-band until very nearly nothing was visible, but the lightning show was definitely worth it, and it was another learning experience.

June 4th - Howard, KS----------When the 13Z outlook came out for a High Risk day in Kansas, you can bet I was excited. These are once or twice a year setups that should produce the best chases of the year. SHOULD is the key word. They also have the reputation for being HUGE bust days. This day ended up somewhere in the middle for us. We started off north on I-35 and stopped at our favorite rest area: Belle Plaine. After over an hour of checking obs, eating grapes, and helping Robin with her thesis (! on a high risk day !), and watching HUGE towering cumulus just outside the door of the rest stop, we decided to reposition to around El Dorado, about 50 miles farther up I-35. Thus the day of the embedded supercell began. The supercells were so closely spaced that you couldn't really define a lot of structure, and after we were west of El Dorado on US-54, the road network through the Flint Hills was VERY bad. We ended up going about 30 miles too far east (to Eureka) to find a road that went north... and even that was only paved for about 6 miles. The W-band did end up getting a VAD profile of the pre-storm environment while we were waiting on a good ol' bright white crushed limestone gravel road north of Eureka. Storms just weren't behaving (interacting with each other, becoming linear, etc.) and so we ended up working our way back farther south on K-99 toward a tornado warned storm in Elk County. We stopped just north of aptly named Howard, KS to take some X-band data. Now, the X-band can't transmit over the radio to communicate with us while they are radiating due to interference, and a dejected W-band crew (us) didn't really attempt to figure out what they were seeing, so about 45 min later when the X-band stopped radiating we were surprised to hear Howie say "we had some pretty strong gate to gate shear there for awhile, and we were thinking of sending you guys out there, but I think it's getting kind of dark". It also would have involved core punching. A lot of work for only a possible tornado that probably would have dissapated by the time we arrived. Meanwhile we heard reports by phone and weather radio that earlier in the day a large photogenic tornado was tracked near Hiawatha, KS, and also a long-track, multiple vortex tornado was apparently on the ground for a while in SW Oklahoma... we were right in the middle of a big pile of nothing. Normally it is a good plan to be in the middle of everything, this day, it definitely was not.

June 3rd - Lawton, OK----------A down day for the radars, we couldn't resist chasing on our own. Robin's friend Blake had just arrived in town for a job interview with Gary England at News 9, and also to chase for a few weeks on his annual "chase-cation". My friend Lisa also accompanied us. Ham radios in tow, we caravaned down I-44 toward what we thought would be the hot spot for the day. Along the way, we saw a very linear looking MCS type feature develop to our west. Between Chickasha and Lawton, it was apparent that this was going to be a bust day. Blake was not deterred however, and we ended up spending the next few hours meandering our way back towards Norman following pulsing LP supercells. Dinner at BW3's in Moore... beer and wings, always a good consolation prize. Evidently Howie knows what he's talking about and he calls days down for a reason...

June 2nd - Hugoton, KS----------We set out on a conditional dryline day with an initial target area of Liberal, KS. The good stuff looked to be up in NE Colorado, but it was just too far for a one-day event. We saw a struggling tower go up to our west as we approached Turpin, in the Oklahoma panhandle. With every pulse it seemed to be getting better organized, and increasing in vertical extent, so we proceeded NW, across the Kansas border to try to intercept. About 10mi SE of Hugoton we witnessed an extremely brief funnel cloud from about 10 miles away, which was promptly followed by a tornado warning. However, within about 10 min it was clear this was not an ordinary supercell. The base started becoming translucent, and we wondered if it was even raining. About 10 min after that, the entire storm began evaporating. Howie said he had seen storms like this before... he just didn't expect it today. Evidently the storm must have retreated into the dry air region behind the dryline, or else the dryline quickly advanced past the location of the storm. Either way, it was more than a little disappointing. Dinner at Pei's famous Chinese restaurant in Liberal... no fish for Howie though.

June 1st - Washburn, TX----------With the record setting only-1-Oklahoma-tornado-in-May drought (and even that one was questionable... from the Tulsa office) over, we made our way home via I-27 to Amarillo, and then I-40 east. Just east of Amarillo, we began seeing tall, persistent dust devils, first to the south, and then in basically all quadrants. We decided to try to take some W-band data. While looking for a good deployment site, we managed to meander our way through some very muddy mud roads to FM-1151 about 6 miles SSW of Washburn, TX. It was a little surprising that there were dust devils at 11am after a heavy rain, but we did manage to take some data on a few that were around a mile away. Later we hypothesized that they probably would have been much more impressive if they would have had more dust. Still, an interesting deployment.

May 31st - Amherst, TX----------We were late departing on our first real chase in a week or so (Wakita not included), so we played catch up (as usual) to the target area which looked to be south of Amarillo, near Tulia by way of our usual route through Altus. We had a visual on the supercell by the time we were approaching Tulia, and began to meander our way SW as new tornado warnings were issued. We attempted a rolling vertical scan through an outflow boundary with the W-band dish on the south edge of the complex... only problem was the storm was advancing too fast for us to transition out of the storm environment. Therefore our dish filled with about 3" of water, which was bad news because Chad, our engineer, "couldn't completely guarantee that the antenna/waveguide interface was waterproof, I figure Howie knew what he was doing". We did indeed have a few data collection problems after that, but after fiddling with a few wires, Chad got the W-band working again, at least partially... we did lose the horizontal channel. As we approached Amherst, TX (not to be confused with the radars' home base in Massachusetts), we witnessed a short-lived series of intense gustnadoes north of town. One looked distinctly different from the rest, with a tube-like shape, and could have been a very brief tornado, if but only for a few seconds. After this, we turned SE on US-83, and did a stop/collect data for 3min/escape the hail core sort of thing for an hour or so before the storm finally gusted out. The largest hailstones I personally saw were around 3 inches, just under baseball size, although I'm sure there were some baseballs in that storm... we just didn't want to stay around long enough to find out. It was pretty intense watching those things splash down in the grater ditches next to us while outside trying to stow the dish/cover my head at the same time. Intense. We ended up staying the night in Lubbock and had dinner at the Texas Land and Cattle steakhouse on the south side of town with the entire DOW crew. Never before or likely ever again will I sit at a table with as many brilliant tornado experts as I did that night... Howie Bluestein, Josh Wurman, Herb Stein, and Curtis Alexander, just to name a few... what an honor.

May 28th - Wakita, OK----------To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the movie "Twister", a bunch of my fellow weather nerds and I decided to go to the weekend festival at the Twister Museum (yes, there is such a place) in Wakita, the town where 'Aunt Meg's house' once stood before the ficticious F-5 tornado hit the town in the movie. It was amazing to see the 'DOROTHY' probes used in the movie (I even bought a replica of one of the 'Pepsi sensors'), as well as speak to the locals that were there during the filming. Hollywood really did a number on the town just for the 5 min or so that showed Wakita post-distruction. Some of the interesting things I learned... some of the downtown buildings had false-fronts because the business owners didn't want their businesses touched... the large Victorian house on the corner shown destroyed in the movie was constructed just for the movie, and didn't have any insides to it... the rubble around town was old bulding materials people had laying around that the movie crew payed to have cleaned up afterwards... the inside of Aunt Meg's house WAS a real house, and all the scenes filmed inside really were inside that house... the town of Wakita was chosen because the mayor at the time (whom I met and had autograph my Twister DVD) offered to let producer use the town for free... the only compensation residents were paid after having their downtown literally closed off from access for weeks was for lost business revenue and some free building demolition (and of course eternal fame...)

May 25th - Tucumcari, NM----------After another full week of downtime, we were once again ancy to get out and collect some data. We had been anticipating the upslope flow regime to set up towards the middle of the week, and decided to target New Mexico on Wednesday instead of Eastern Colorado the two previous days, due to its (relative) proximity. (and also due to the fact that it was one of only 4 or the 50 states I had not yet been to... ok so that wasn't really a factor in Howie's decision, but still, I was pretty excited to cross the state line! Just in case you're curious, the other three left to go are Alaska (going there this July), Hawaii, and Louisiana. My goal is to take a picture at the Louisiana sign for #50... which I think would be a better plan than taking a picture at the Hawaii sign........ ok enough digression.) We stopped to see Matt Kramar at the NWS office in Amarillo to get a data update, and determined that the likely area of initiation would be along a strong surging cold front, just in the lee of the Raton Ridge in NE New Mexico. There was also a well-defined outflow structure moving westward through the TX panhandle about to cross the NM border. The intersection of those two boundaries could also be a focal point of convective initiation. We decided to progress to the border, and make a decision there on whether to go further NW towards storms firing off the upslope flow over the Raton Ridge, or to stay and take W-band data of the outflow boundary near the border and wait for new initiation. As we crossed the border (yay!!) we could see no well defined structure that would signal an outflow boundary (although its pretty hard to see one visually), and had been tracking the anvil of a storm waaay in the distance since just east of Amarillo (the Raton Ridge storm), so we decided to move on to Tucumcari, refuel, and reassess. On the way, we saw two brief dust devils and had fleeting thoughts of scanning them with the W-band. But by brief, I mean ~30 sec, and so we kept on moving. By the time we reached Tucumcari and the mesa lands of NE New Mexico, the anvil of the storm to our NW had overspread us, so we chose to keep moving WNW on NM-104. We crossed one mesa, and then another, looking for an appropriate deployment site (it's hard to get a clear view of the storm with mountains of rock in the way!), finally we found one on top of a third mesa, ~20mi WNW of Tucumcari. By the time we got the X-band fired up, large, well-defined mammatus were beginning to overspread us. This promted us to deploy the W-band (which we had a little trouble getting set up... and later trouble getting back stowed... during a lightning storm on top of a mesa... seems like it grew somehow on the drive out) to take some RHI's of the mammatus structure. With the storm looking decent, but still out of range, and not wanting to get too much farther from home, we decided to pack up and head back towards Tucumcari where there were some new storms firing up along the intersection of the front and the outflow (I began driving the W-band at this point...first chance to actually drive during a deployment as usually Robin drove to the deployment and Pei drove from that point...but as it's Robin's radar to operate and Pei's back at UMass, I was in charge of getting us around). We made it back to Tucumcari around sunset and went back west on I-40 to San Jon, NM, where we turned south on NM-469, stopped on the south edge of town and scanned the new storm to our SSE. As it was 30mi south and moving slowly southward, Howie made the call to go after it rather than give up and head back to Amarillo for dinner with Matt at Golden Corral, so we kept going south, climed to the top of the plateau (with hundreds of wind generators on top) which had an elevation of 4,900ft (!), and progressed onward to the east on NM-209, stopped again for several minutes (this time in the pitch black) to scan the very electrically active storm to the SSE. Howie advised us to keep our generator running in case they saw a hook with the X-band...which would have made a real challenge for us, as the X-band has a real-time display, but we only have a video screen to see where we're pointing the W-band. (maybe we could have guided it by the nearly constant lightning flashes?) We decided to keep moving south. As we approached Clovis, NM, another storm to our west was starting to take over as the dominant storm, and our storm seemed to be quickly decreasing in intensity. We stopped anyway, just a few miles north of town to scan both storms. We discovered a strong reflectivity core on our storm, but a much smaller size than the western storm. As it was already 9:30pm local (Mountain) time, we were concerned about finding our dinner and a place to stay in Clovis, and we decided not to go back west after the more intense storm. We found rooms at the Holiday Inn on the east side, and Robin and I had dinner with some interesting locals (one of which had an asthma attack on site... probably due to the thick fog of cigarette smoke) at Dave's Coffee Shop, which wasn't really a coffee shop at all, more like a 24hr restaurant/smoke-a-thon. Every place of business in town seemed to be lamenting the expected closure of Cannon AFB, which sadly I could see would hit a small town like that very hard. Good luck to them.

May 18th - Belle Plaine, KS----------After a no-go to Nebraska the day before, and with both Robin's and my dad in town, and a LARGE (perhaps indefinite) window of no opportunity looming afterwards, and a near-heroic effort by Pei working non-stop throughout the weekend to get the W-band radar back up and running (final diagnosis...a bad oscilliscope. NOTHING wrong with the radar itself), we made the decision to go north on a conditional threat of initiation along a weak and diffuse dryline in southern Kansas. The pictures sum up the afternoon nicely... we spent 6 hours at the rest stop on the Kansas Turnpike before some regular airmass thunderstorms finally started up, and we got to collect data with the very slow rotation rate on the X-band to test the spaced antenna. A nice sunset, and a very nice stacked pileus cap cloud later, dad left to head back north towards Osage City (which by the way was that evening's only thunderstorm warning...a 50 mph wind), and we headed back to Norman. The next day we were all very sad to give Pei back to UMass, and my dad called to say that overnight an 80mph wind had blown a train over SE of town. Glad we're in the radar business and not the train business.

May 12th - South Plains, TX----------Woke up in Garden City at about 4:15 am, forced myself back to sleep, then likewise at about 5, and finally stayed awake at 6:30. Found it was 42 degrees with a 30mph wind from the NW... obviously the front near the KS/NE border the previous day had gone through over night. Religiously checked all obs, reports, models, and anything else I thought useful until about 9. Found the front had pushed through even the N. TX panhandle and other than that the setup was looking pretty favorable for the SE TX panhandle area. Talked things over with Howie till about 10am until everyone else wokeup, then had a quick meteorologist powwow and decided to head back south to Liberal and re-evaluate. Made it to Liberal by noon and had lunch at a Chinese buffet where Howie had a HUGE fried fish (complete with head/eyeballs/fins) that looked like it had died about a week ago and someone in the kitchen deemed it edible against their better judgement while Kery worked through lunch to try to burn all our data from the night before onto DVD's to free up space (the X-pol generates 1GB of data per minute). Pulled out heading south on US-83 literally FEET ahead of DOW3, and ended up caravanning all the way down through Bryans Corner OK, Perryton, Pampa, Clarendon, and Turkey, TX to the canyonlands around Caprock. Turned west on Farm Road 97 to intercept developing severe warned meso with beautiful striations and HP structure. Turned north on FM-1065 and stopped on a hill to let X-band deploy, then took a winding road (FM-689) through the canyon in the W-band in an attempt to intercept possible tornado/funnels. Deployed W-band 3 mi north of South Plains on FM-207 and found that due to a few power surges on the rough canyon roads and quick decelerations (and unreliable generator) were not receiving a return signal. Pei troubleshooted the radar while I watched a wall cloud about 2 miles to my NW cycle a few times. After about 15 min with no output from the oscilliscope, decided that the W-band was dead (or near death), and decided to pursue the next meso that had developed to the SW (which we could see from our current position already had a well-defined wall cloud). Continued S on FM-97 and W on FM-2286 where we spotted a dust whirl which quickly occluded, and then another from beneath the wall cloud. Two brief tornadoes. As we approached the Hall/Floyd county line (Hall Co. already had a tornado warning) we stopped the W-band, tried to redeploy (unsuccessfully), and watched in awe as a third tornado spun up and formed a somewhat long-lived tube (~3 min) that never quite fully connected to the main cloud base, yet was the most impressive tornado I had ever witnessed). I called in the report to the NWS Amarillo, and soon after a tornado warning was issued for Floyd County "due to a confirmed sighting from a trained weather spotter" (i.e. ME). Floyd County stayed tornado warned for approximately the next 3-4 hours. This tornado, like the others, gusted out, and we continued to watch a series of gustnados form after the main tornado in the outflow region of the storm. After about 10 min. of watching this, the 10-15 degree cooler rear flank downdraft reached us, and the winds switched from 10-15 mph at our backs to about 25-30 mph in our face, and large raindrops started to fall. We quickly packed up the W-band and headed back east. Since we were out of radio range from the X-band, we reached Dan Dawson by phone, and he reported to us that they were currenly tracking a large donut hole (a signiture of an HP-supercell tornado) to our NE. We were out of position and could barely barely make out an indistinct wall cloud with heavy rain as a backdrop. We weren't sure whether this was the original storm we deployed on, or the subsequent one where we saw the tornado. We decided to keep moving east to get a better vantage point. Eventually we made it back on to FM-97, and saw DOW5 (the rapid-scan DOW) on the side of the road. We figured we could raise the X-band on the radio through them, or at least meet up with the X-band later, and ended up caravanning with them back to about the site of the original X-band deployment, at FM-1065. Drove through several areas of strong chaser convergence, and spotted several friends from OU at the top of the Caprock along the way. All this time, the storm maintained a nice hook/donut hole feature, although we never observed another tornado. We met back up with Howie and the X-band just north of Flomot, TX on FM-599 deployed at a beautiful location overlooking the caprock and three wall clouds/mesos in a row from N to NW to SW... as Curtis in DOW3 said, "wall clouds, all quadrants". An impressive site. However, the X-band again had a full harddrive, after collecting coordinated data with the DOW's (at the midpoint on their dual-doppler baseline, with the spaced antenna!), as well as data on their own of the several hooks/donut holes throughout the afternoon/evening... and it was getting dark again, so with the crippled W-band and a full X-band we decided to head home, with a very impressive wall cloud developing basically over our head to the north. Reports of a strong/photogenic/longer than 3-4 min torando north of South Plains were made after this time, but also that tornado evidently wrapped baseball/softball sized hail around and broke out all front/side windows that happened to be facing towards it at the time, so given the fact we had already observed a few brief tornadoes that day, I was glad we left. Routed home through Vernon, TX, Frederick, OK (stopped at Sonic) and Lawton. Since the tornadoes I and the other W-band crew members observed were all on the same meso, I'll count them as one... therefore as of May 12, Eric's current lifetime tornado count is 2.

May 11th - Friend, KS----------Both radar trucks left about 11am prepared for a long, overnight chase to SW Kansas (my first chase in my home state!), by way of the Northwest passage and Woodward. Got to Liberal, KS (home of Dorothy) about 4pm, stopped to check obs, models, and satellite photos to see if initiation had started yet. All the focus was on S. central Nebraska to NW Kansas along the warm front (several tornadoes were reported, although it wasn't the outbreak that was anticipated. Only long lived tornado was near CO/KS/NE junction), so we had SW Kansas relatively to ourselves, waiting for initiation southward along the dryline. We were in a moderate risk area, but the cap evidently was stronger than the models anticipated, and convection didn't break out until about 5:30pm, west and south of Garden City. At this time, we left to head north to try to intercept the southern most cells along the dryline, as the storm motion was almost due north at 30kts. Stopped 2-3 mi north of Garden City, as the sun was low and made for some good pictures behind the developing meso to the NW we had followed since initiation. Deployed the X-band, and got some data on the supercell for about 20 min. Sun appeared from behind the backbuilding anvil, and blinded us all, so we decided to move farther north to hopefully get back in the shadow (for better pics too, and to redeploy). Made it to Friend, KS at about 7pm as some nice new mesos were finally forming to our south. Deployed X-band, and found a nice hook on the storm to the SW, about 60km away, due west of Garden City. Took a good data set for another 30 min or so, until we started seeing a steady stream of chasers move south on US-83, 1/4 mile to our east... first DOW3, then the Hummer Severe WX response team caravanning with about 5 other cars, then Chris Weiss's Texas Tech mesonet cars. Figured they knew something we didn't, turned on NOAA radio, and sure enough, a tornado warning was issued, right as we were shutting down the X-band, and pulling out to head back south as well. Redeployed X-band for the third time in the parking lot of the big feedlot on the north edge of Garden City as the sun was setting, and also observed a brief funnel cloud on the same storm we were watching in Friend. Also a third meso was now maturing south of this storm, and also had a tornado warning. Watched the Friend storm until the hook collapsed, then switched to the third meso (located near Ulysses, KS) to observed a strange, messy meso just as the first tornado report came in. By this time it was nearly dark, and we had concern for our safety, and Howie decided not to send the W-band in for a closer look (it can only gather data within 10 km of the area of interest). As the storm was on a path for Garden City, we decided to just wait around, check into the hotel, get some food, and then redeploy as it got closer. Did all this and as we were leaving Burger King, the tornado sirens went off in Garden City. Looked for a deployment site IN town, since we didn't have enough time to get a few miles out of town, and finally found a clear view to the SW near a HS soccer field (and associated muddy path and 15 foot ditch), prayed not to get the trucks stuck as large raindrops and eventually small hail began to fall. Were deployed for about 15 minutes before very close lightning strikes and a bit larger hail told us it was time to leave (I was a bit scared, since we were about 10 feet from a 120ft tall large metal pole). Backtracked along the now muddier road, and made it back to pavement, redeployed for the 5th time on the shoulder of an exit ramp (also not very safe) to watch the meso disintegrate above our heads (and likewise above Garden City). No tornado was reported in Garden City, as the storm was in the process of dying this whole time. Checked into the Best Value Inn (former Super-8 from hell according to Robin, who had a run-in with former management) about 11pm. Watched the storms form a linear MCS mess on TV and went to bed ancy for the next day, also progged to be a Mod risk just to our south.

May 10th - Howardwick, TX----------Due to finals/confusion/distance we weren't able to make it up to the obvious target of near York, NE (where there ended up being 14 confirmed tornadoes) and had a somewhat conditional/late start from Sarkey's at around 2pm, leaving Howie's house at ~3pm after we saw the first convective towers initiate on the dryline in the TX panhandle. We made a last second decision to head SW on I-44 instead of due west on I-40 because instability/moisture looked best in the SW TX panhandle. Reached Hollis/TX state line on US-62 by ~5pm, turned north on US-83, and deployed ~20 mi south of Shamrock on the only storm in sight, a T-storm warned storm still 40-50 km to our NNW, visible since Lawton. The X-band thus took its first data of the season - the rest of us waited and watched new cells form to the west along the dryline, as the W-band was out of range for the storm of interest. We received word that the new cell had just been issued a warning, 2 counties to our west, and since our storm was dying, we decided to head up to Shamrock, then west on I-40 to intercept. Just south of Shamrock, the new cell was upgraded to a tornado warning, which made my heart jump and beat a little faster, since this was our first tornado warning of the season in the trucks, and we were well within range. Soon after, we began seeing mammatus and from a distance, a translucent rain curtain, backlit by the setting sun. We stopped at the county line road between Gray, Carson, Armstrong, and Donley counties (the warning was for Armstrong county - the SW one) about 25 miles east of the updraft. The X-band deployed in sector scan mode with the spaced antenna for the first time ever, and the W-band took RHI's through the mammatus, as we were too far away to see any rotation or possible tornado. After around 20 min, the storm appeared to injest a significant amount of dry air, and soon after quickly fell apart. W-band was sent to intercept the updraft just before this happened, but by the time we made it halfway there, the storm was hardly even raining anymore (it put out a few good dying spider lightning flashes though). We met Matt Kramar (NWS-Amarillo, Howie's former student) at McClain to see some early photos of the second storm, then had Subway back at Shamrock around ~8:45 (at the same truckstop we stopped at last week) and then back home. What was a conditional day quickly turned promising and even exciting (especially for me, and my first real deployment) but a few bad breaks (late start, I-44 instead of I-40, too long at first deployment site) kept us from seeing an actual funnel. Regardless, it was our first supercell/mesocyclone of the season.

May 8th - Maud, OK----------After the bust the day before, Nic and I were pretty down. So when storms fired up in SW Oklahoma, near Lawton, we watched with anticipation as we were studying for our radar final on the next day. Due to the lack of shear, they ended up forming a large multicellular mess. However, Gary England and co. dispatched Ranger 9, and VIPIR and Doppler 9000 were both working overtime, so we couldn't resist just going down to take a look as they crossed I-35. One of the cells was displaying some characteristics of rotation, and were all EXTREMELY electrically active. Since Nic's research area is lightning, we thought it would be a good chance to get some good pics. We headed south on I-35 about 20 miles, turned east on SH-59, and by this time were approaching one of the regions of intense convection, lots of cloud-to-cloud lightning, and a small rain-free base in the distance to the SE. We kept heading east, took about 4 or 5 CG strikes within a mile or so from the car, and punched through the core, which had some pretty heavy rain and large drops, but since the storms were so high based, no hail. We headed north for a bit, and then continued east on SH-39, and then back north on SH-9A, to just south of Maud, where the storms began to die out. Lightning was still fairly intense to the south however, and with the setting sun peeking out below the cloud deck, a nice rainbow appeared, so we decided to try to set up for some lightning shots. I only managed to get one rainbow/lightining photo (handheld) before I set up my tripod, and the lightning quickly decreased in intensity... although there were several cool spider-type ones that spread across the sky as we were packing up. All in all a nice quick (2hr) chase close to home.

May 7th - Groom, TX----------After a week or so of unseasonably cool springtime weather in central Oklahoma, everyone (including Howie) was itching to get out and gather some data. The newly remodeled X-band truck arrived the day before, along with the two radar engineers from UMass - Kery and Pei, just in time for what looked like an obvious severe weather setup playing the very distinct dryline in the panhandle of Texas. Decent shear, but dewpoints only in the upper 50s and a large cirrus shield threatened to suppress instability just enough so that convection might not initiate. But since we had two radars for the first time, and a full crew (Robin, Pei, and I in the W-band and Mike, Howie, and Kery in the X-band), we decided to head out. We arrived in Shamrock, TX at about 3pm and stopped to reassess the situation. About 15-20 other chase vehicles also had the same plan, and dozens of weather nerds were vying for wireless access in the Best Western parking lot. A strange sight indeed. Howie wore a mask of Richard Nixon to avoid being recognized. (not really, but it would have been funny if he did) After refueling and talking over the situation for 30 min or so, Howie decided to send the W-band (my truck) by itself to rendezvous with Chris Weiss (one of Howie's former students) and his dryline research group 8 miles north of Groom, TX, or about 40 miles WNW of our present location. We were to break off and meet back up with Howie and the X-band if any convection initiated. (Turns out, that wasn't a problem) After meeting Chris, we had some trouble getting the radar to boot up (but Pei and her infinite genius fixed it) after 45 min or so. When it finally started up, Chris did 4 transects of the dryline by going 5 miles on this straight country road at 30mph, turning around and doing it again. For two of them the beam was pointed vertically, and for two he was performing "rolling RHI's" in which he sampled cross sections of the dryline. All the while the 11 of his students that were with him also did transects with mobile mesonet cars (one leading Chris in the truck, one on each end, and another doing transects on his own). Pei had to tear the seat out of the cab of the truck to work on the radar, so I sat on it in the ditch on the side of the road and watched all this take place with some big ol' Texas bulls to keep me company. We were probably the only chasers in Texas that day that saw any action at all, so it wasn't a total bust for us, but when you drive 7-8 hrs roundtrip expecting to at least see a thunderstorm, you get a little disappointed. National Geographic also showed up to interview Chris, and me and a few other students were in the background of the shot, so we had to sign waivers, and that was pretty cool. So the day wasn't too bad for me, because this was also my first real chase with the radar trucks. Howie bailed out (still in Shamrock) with the X-band about 7pm, and we headed home about 8pm, met up with a large group of other chasers from OU at the "Texas Roadhouse" in Shamrock for dinner (I had "Steak Trimmings"... really good) and got back to Norman by 1:30am.

April 25th - Sanger, TX (photos by Claire McConnell)----------Who says climate scientists aren't interested in severe weather?? At around 3pm, on the way home from a pre-planned trip to SMU in Dallas to hear a lecture on America's policy options to address climate change, we learned of a recently issued tornado watch for North Texas. "We" being myself, Dr. Karoly, and 7 other students(!) in his impacts of climate change course. And the kicker is that we were all in an 11-passenger van!! (or "minibus" as they call it in Australia and the UK) Storm chasing in a huge van, 'bring it on' we said! At this point, we were already on the I-635 loop about 15 miles north of downtown, with the newest warnings being issued for Weatherford, TX on the COMPLETE opposite side of the metroplex. We turned and watched the towers develop that would eventually spawn two tornados, one of them in Dallas county. We decided to continue heading north, as more towers were developing in that direction, and it would provide better chase territory (i.e. NOT an urban area in the middle of rush hour). We stopped at a truck stop in Krum, TX to buy a map, and then after calling back to Norman for a radar update, continued north on I-35, and then west on FM 455, just outside the city limits of Sanger on a large hill where we could see the well-defined bases of the storm immediately to our NW. The 9 of us watched as a few wall clouds cycled, with visible rapid rising motion at cloud base, and even slight rotation visible from 5-6 miles away. But the wall clouds were barely connected to the storm proper, and eventually the bases began to fall apart as well. On the way home we drove under a beautiful LP supercell south of Pauls Valley, OK which produced a supernumerary rainbow which we were all very excited to witness.

April 21st - Purcell, OK ----------First chase with the recently arrived W-band radar truck was a bust - it was more of just a test run to see if maps/GPS/other equipment were working ok. We made it about 15 miles south of Norman, as we watched the piddliest looking towers literally evaporate before our eyes. Robin, Mike, Dan, Howie, and I enjoyed a BEAUTIFUL Oklahoma evening in a field near Purcell, then headed home. 45 min door to door = quickest chase of my life.

April 5th - Tom Bean, TX ----------What was anticipated to be a fairly widespread tornado outbreak for early April ended up provided storm chasing entertainment in the form of a squall line and LONG hailstorm. While stopping to check for a recent radar image at a WiFi spot (Love's truckstop in Ardmore, OK) we were encouraged by a little blip, just south of the Red River. That blip QUICKLY turned into a massive linear beast of a squall line in a very high shear environment. Fortunately, in the meantime we were able to make it to the southernmost extent of the line in rural north central Texas, just south of US 82 near Sherman, TX. Northwest of the town of Tom Bean, we were forced to pull over to the side of the road for what turned in to a 15+ minute hail storm... by far the longest I have ever experienced. I think the hail core was just training over our location, as nickel-sized hail ended up covering the ground and ditches and fields quickly flooded. I called in a storm report to the NWS soon after, as a still visibly nervous Nic contemplated possible damage to his car. For this reason, I'm glad we didn't see any baseballs (although that would have been cool). From there, we meandered back north realizing that no tornado would develop in an environment like this w/o discrete cells. After crossing the Red River, we found an even BETTER colorful local restaurant: Hobo Joe's in Madill, OK. Priceless.

March 21st - Pharoah, OK ----------What began as an overly excited an anxious start to the 2005 severe weather season ended as the most fruitful chase to date for Nic Wilson and me -- our first tornado! With very little CAPE and marginal moisture, we proved that it is still possible for tornadic (albeit low-topped) supercells to form in high shear environments. Winds were screaming at low levels and provided just enough dynamics to squeeze out a rain-wrapped funnel. We were able to watch this storm from its birth directly above Sarkey's Energy Center (watching from the roof). We left Norman, cut north through backroads to I-40, then travelled east to mile marker 200 to assess the situation. We both looked at each other in disbelief as literally seconds after we pulled into the truckstop Nic's weather radio sounded a tornado warning for Seminole county - the county we stopped in - 5 miles from our location. It was the first tornado warning of the year in Oklahoma! As we raced over to the storm, we just barely missed the first tornado of 2005 in Cromwell (Hwy 99A and 56 Hwy). I did notice some deeply concerned locals standing around a damaged outbuilding as we drove through, and later heard that this was the only damage it caused. We then rejoined I-40 and were faced with a decision: continue on the Cromwell storm, head for a new storm forming directly to the NE, or head south to anticipate new convection. We chose the second option. Following emergency management vehicles and other interested parties in a 7-8 car caravan, and persisting through numerous cycling wall clouds over the next 15 minutes, we were finally rewarded as one other vehicle and us popped over a small hill and witnessed a small, rain-wrapped funnel descending over the trees of the next hill. We both stopped our cars and I asked the other man, "Is that a tornado?" (technically, a funnel cloud isn't a tornado until it touches the ground) to which he replied somewhat annoyed "Of course it's a tornado!" Thus, my first tornado. We later celebrated with some cows in a flooded field, and had dinner at a colorful local restaurant in Henryetta, OK.

(all photographs copyright Eric Holthaus, but may be used with permission and citation)