Watching the Skies

Check out some of these pictures and videos of a storm chase I performed on May 19th. These storms were relatively easy to chase as they moved at about 30mph due east. This allowed me to easily catch up or outrun the storms, as well as being able to stay on the same road for the entire chase.

Chase Mileage: 660 miles
Number of tornadoes seen: 2

I departed from the Dallas Metroplex headed twards Lawton, OK. A new day 1 outlook from the SPC was then issued, which included a ‘High’ risk of severe storms. The high risk area was further north and east of my original target area. I changed my target area to a storm that had initiated and was moving towards Hennessey OK. This was the correct decision, as I arrived in Hennessey just as the storm popped down a large cone tornado! (the video will be forthcoming later).

Next I decided to stay with this storm and travel east along SR-51. This also ended up being the best decision, as the storm ultimately put out a large funnel cloud near Stillwater, OK but didnt quite make it to the ground. Unfortunately I did not see the tornado that damaged mobile homes in Stillwater however. The rest of the chase was spent driving around attempting to target a few other storm cells, but ultimately I was either too far away or the storms sucked in too much cold air.

Either way, it was a good day for tornado viewing. For now, a few videos I was able to get online quickly. I will get the Hennessey OK tornado video online soon.

05-19-10 Oklahoma Tornadoes!

Wow, amazing day! Tornado warned storm plowed through the area just 4 miles south of Frisco after 7pm bringing widespread high wind reports and some tornado damage to areas just west of Frisco. I took the liberty to take screen shots of the storm as it moved through the area, and draw a storm track on a Google map so you can see just how close we came. But first, a brief history and timeline. The timeline is relevant to storm events reported near Frisco and not a complete list.

• 4:30pm I notice a cluster of supercells merging into a large storm complex near Abilene TX about 130 miles west of Frisco.
• 5:00pm this storm appears to have evolved into a severe line of storms looking like a bow echo. This storm is in a favorable environment and at current speed will reach Frisco by 7:30pm
• 6:04pm Tornado Warning is issued for Denton county, does not include Frisco yet but the storm’s track is still set to move very close to Frisco.
• 6:40pm Tornado is spotted on the ground in Roanoke, 22 miles WSW of Frisco. Spotted by Amateur Radio operators.
• 6:43pm Tornado Warning is issued for Denton, Collin, Tarrant, Dallas and Rockwall counties. This includes Frisco and The Colony.
• 6:50pm Tornado spotted by retired NWS employee, brief touchdown in Flower Mound, 15 miles WSW of Frisco.
• 6:53pm Tornado ripped roof off and collapsed wall to apartment building in Flower Mound, 15 miles WSW of Frisco.
• 6:56pm Tornado sirens finally start to sound for Frisco, note the 13 minute discrepency. This is EXACTLY why I tell everyone not to trust the sirens.
• 7:00pm I get out of work, the storm is now less than 8 miles away from Frisco,
• 7:05pm I drive one mile west along Warren Pkwy. At the intersection of Warren & Legacy I observe power flashes on the horizon about 3 miles to my WSW. At this time I turn around and head back home, 1.5 miles away.
• 7:12pm I arrive at home just as the very high winds and rains hit. Sirens are still going off.
• 7:14pm The strongest rotation made a last minute right turn and passes 4 miles south of Frisco, into Plano. The sirens stop at this time.
• 7:14pm 72 MPH wind gust observed at Frisco Fire Station on Main Street and Preston Road.
• 7:19pm 78 MPH wind gust observed at a school in Plano, near Independance and Spring Creek.

Allow me to reiterate how close this storm was. The storm’s center of circulation passed only 4 miles south of the T-Mobile site in Frisco (where I was at the time). At the time the tornado warning was issued for Frisco, the storms current track took it within 1/2 mile of the T-Mobile site in Frisco. Below is a Google map I just made demonstrating this.

The red circles indicate tornado sightings and tornado damage reports. The red line indicates the path of the storm’s center of circulation. The blue line indicates the storms projected path when the tornado warning was issued for Frisco. The purple circle shows where the T-Mobile building is, and where I was at the time. As you can see… this was a close call. If the storm had maintained its current track and not turned right in Lewisville, Frisco could have been hit head on.

Above is a radar snap from 7:09pm CDT, when the storm’s center of circulation was at its closest to Frisco. Left side is standard precipitation and the right is base velocity. You can see a weak reflectivity couplet that is unfortnately a tad obscured by the large yellow warning box. The yellow and red icons indicate areas of wind damage, and tornado reports respectively.

At this time, some damage reports in Frisco have come in according to Fox News KDFW. Some homeowners had their fences blown down, satelite dishes blown off their houses and windows broken. Another reports states at least three seperate 18-wheeler trucks blown off the road and tipped over due to high winds, mostly around Fort Worth. The Denton County Sherrifs Office reported a minor explosion at a gas station due to the weather. Across the metroplex, a whopping 260,000 homes are reported without power.

Now we will wait and see what the NWS in Fort Worth states after they conduct their damage surveys, before we officially declare this as a tornado. Considering the numerous spotter reports, storm damage reports, and the radar velocity couplet, there is a good chance this will be classified as a tornado event. I will publish updates to this once the storm damage survey is released.

Looks like the chase days for the rest of my vacation are numbered. Low pressure system camping out in the Gulf is moving ashore Saturday, killing any chances of wide spread organized severe weather through Tuesday. To top it off, it will be rain showers and general thunderstorms all Memorial Day weekend, so sight seeing won’t be a great possibility either. I am pretty bummed out about this. Anyways, looks like west Nebraska got some more storms today but none of them appeared severe as no severe weather reports have come in from that area. A total of 7 severe weather reports across the country today in the height of severe weather season, this makes me sad.Makes me think I should have just driven back down to my home town of Tampa Florida where more severe weather has occurred in the last 6 days, than the rest of the country combined.

Concerning the tornado report in central Pinellas County for Friday May 22, several pictures were snapped of it, which appears was just a very large funnel cloud. Still, no damage reports have been called into media outlets or the NWS. See previous post for radar snap of the storm as it was over Largo.

Well, after an exhausting 34 hours of driving in 54 hours time, I am back home. I used Thursday to travel back from Kearney Nebraska to Frisco Texas. Looking at the upcoming weather forecasts, looks like I am not missing much. I read a cool blog entry where the VORTEX2 team actually intercepted a supercell near Alliance Nebraska, basically where I was. Below is a link to their blog post about their chase day.

http://tornadoscientists.blogspot.com/2009/05/surprise-supercell-intercept.html

Now let me give you a synopsis of my chase day… I left Kearney Nebraska and headed for Alliance. This seemed to be the convergence area that all the chasers picked as I passed at least two separate chase tours and numerous independent chasers.  I got to Alliance around 2:30pm, gave me plenty of time to spare so I could get some food and check data to verify my location was good. Saw some cumulus puffs forming, and storm anvils to my distant west.

Middle of nowhere, Nebraska.

Storms 100 miles west in Wyoming.

I waited until about 3:30pm when a storm storm was about to pass through Angora. I shot south along US 385 till I found a spot just to the north of Bridgeport and just hung out for a few minutes. I got hailed on with pea sized hail for a minute, before the storm moved on to the north east. The storm was still strong but not severe as it moved into an area with absolutely no road network to chase with. After the heaviest rain passed, I traveled north again to a rural unpaved road along 385 then sat and watched it for a good 30 minutes as it moved away. I actually saw the TIV along the side of the road with other support vehicles around it, following the same storm as me! Other chasers actually stopped right next to me and we watched a large coal freight train move by and contemplated our other storm options. We decided after 30 or so minutes to shoot back to Alliance and pull a wait and see maneuver.

Trying to blast south and catch up with the storm.

Heavy rains just before the pea sized hail.

Watching the rain and hail move into an area with no roads.

Waiting with other chasers, contemplating our next move.

Watching the heavy freight train roll by.

I pulled into Alliance shortly after 4pm, and noticed a severe storm in extreme north west Nebraska, about a hour drive north. This storm had good looking winds on it and looked like a miniature bow echo for a short while so after maybe 5 minutes of waiting in Alliance, I abandoned the other chasers and headed north towards Chadron. As far as I could tell, this severe storm was sitting in a better environment so I figured this storm would be a shoe in for me. Well about 15 miles before I reached Chadron, the storm had lost its severity and was no longer severe warned. I found a nice pull off with a beautiful wide open field to stop and watch the storm roll in. The storm still had a general shape of a bow echo and I was sitting right on the southern part of it, hoping to catch some strong winds. I caught a few neat pics of a gust front ahead of the storm, and wind gusts up to 35mph with my handheld anemometer.

Blasting north twards Chadron trying to catch up with this beast.

15 miles south of Chadron, waiting to see what the storm does next.

Still south of Chadron watching the approaching gust front.

A one in a million lightning shot during the day. This is using a Canon Powershot SD1000 with a 1/60 exposure time, and I captured lightning! WOW.

At this time, I noticed the remnants of the storm that I was originally chasing had actually become severe and looked supercellular, DOH! The storm was 70 miles to my ESE, moving east at about 30 mph. By this time it was 6pm and assuming all goes well I would intercept this storm at 8pm at the earliest. I decided to shoot south to Alliance again, then take state road 2 east as fast as I could. I anticipated on arriving in Thedford Nebraska as the storm was arriving, right around sunset.  While driving south on 385 towards Alliance, I got some more pea sized hail which slowed my travel down. I passed two more VORTEX2 vehicles which appeared to be part of the mobile mesonet. Then as I was driving state road 2 through the rural sand hills, a line of storms formed along the cold front directly in front of me. This was unexpected! I saw some very low level clouds forming below the general cloud deck which appeared to be a shelf cloud! This line of developing storms was occurring behind the severe warned supercell I was intending on catching, but directly in front of me. It was pretty to watch but the storms happened to be moving about the same speed as me since I was not able to get in front of these storms easily. For a brief moment I thought I saw a funnel cloud forming out of the shelf cloud about 3 miles to my south east, but the road took be behind some tall hills and by the time I emerged, there was no trace of the funnel. I drove through about 20 miles of white out condition rains which dropped my speed to 40mph and basically left me stuck right in the worst of this storm as we were traveling about the same speed. I finally emerged from the rain near Whitman Nebraska and saw the leading edge of this shelf cloud as it started to collapse. I continued to drive east towards Thedford but by the time I arrived, the supercell storm was no longer severe and had moved out of Thedford. About this time the sun had just set, so I decided to call it a day. I prepared for another 3 hour drive back towards Kearney for the night.

Shelf cloud starting to develop a few short miles infront of me.

A possible funnel cloud emerging from the shelf cloud? Sorry for the blur, its dark, and I am driving 70mph trying to get ahead of this.

Very heavy rains infront of me, this is the leading edge of the storm front, just behind the shelf cloud.

Finally ahead of the storm front, the shelf cloud has collapsed. This is the end of my chase day.

All in all, I am happy that I picked the same target area as the professionals with VORTEX2 and other chasers. However I did not pick the right individual storms it appears. At the time that I made my decision they were the strongest storms in the area. If the original storm I had picked hadn’t moved into an area with no roads, then I’d have stayed on that storm until it became the supercell. I also learned that I will no longer use an integrated data card for my cellular data service. The connection drops when you switch roaming data providers and does not reconncet. Next time I will tether to a BlackBerry so I don’t have that issue again. Also 14 hours of driving does not work well for me when driving solo. Next time I will keep it to 12 or less. I got a few good pictures but nothing amazing. I will not put my telephoto lense on the DSLR camera anymore either, capturing the entire storm is more important than capturing telephoto detail.

You can view the rest of my gallery here: http://watchingtheskies.com/?page_id=33&album=4&gallery=29

This will be short as I have a massive headache right now. Finally, got to go chase storms after all these years of me talking about it, it finally happened! However it was not a great day for chasing. I got to Alliance, Nebraska around 2:30pm then sat and waited for storms to kick off. Passed several storm chase tour groups, even saw the TIV featured in the Storm Chasers TV show. Storms kicked off, I drove around for about 5 hours  straight chasing them, got hailed on with pea sized hail twice, but didn’t see too terribly much interesting. Got a few pictures that look neat, but nothing photogenic unfortunately. Two severe storm warnings were issued for storms in my area but I was unable to reach either one before they weakened. I will post more on this later, but again its 1am and I have a massive headache that is almost blinding so this is all for now.

Internet here is slow, so I will post the pictures once I arrive back at my house in Frisco TX. I am staying overnight in Kearney Nebraska again, should make for a 11 hour drive back home which isnt too terribly bad.

The next two days appear extremely quiet with no organized severe storms expected. Below is the day 1 outlook, valid for May 21 2009.

At kind of the last minute, I decided to drive 11 hours up to Kearney Nebraska. This puts me in a 4 hour drive away from a target area of either west or north Nebraska where there is a potential for elevated supercells to develop.

I arrived up here at around 10:15pm which was 45 minutes ahead of schedule. Now I can officially scratch Kansas and Nebraska off my list of states to visit too! The drive itself isn’t bad… traffic is light to non existent and the speed limits reach 75mph. There is a large patch of south central Nebraska along US 81 that has no cellular coverage for a good 60+ miles though which was a little nerve wracking. I always knew there was alot of nothing out here in the plains, but it is certainly something wild to experience the true level of nothingness out here.

I have heard chasing storms in western Nebraska can be no fun due to the extremely limited road network, radar coverage being poor, and likely no cellular data service. Looks like these will be storms I am just gonna have to eyeball. Oh well, itll be fun either way!

Above is the day 1 forecast by the SPC, valid for May 20 2009. Currently, looks like storms will initiate along and ahead of a cold front that will stretch from north east Colorado/south east Wyoming/Nebraska panhandle, to along the Nebraksa/South Dakota border. At this time I am thinking of heading to Alliance Nebraska. It is a 4.5 hour drive from Kearney, so this will give me an ETA of about 2:30 to 3pm, just in time for the storm initiation! This also gives me a North/South and East option incase I want to change storm target areas. Currently we got bumped to a slight risk for the Nebraska panhandle, 2% tornado, 15% hail and 5% wind risk. Not much, but its something.

Day 3 out of 11, I didn’t leave this area at all. Once again, nothing happened. The most interesting stuff was heavy rain in Florida, and some random high wind and hail reports in the western states. Today was supposed to be yet another home chore day but it became home bored/nap every few hours day. I hate being bored. I have no idea what to do for Tuesday either, again no notable storms are set to occur and the storms that are forecast are going to be a 27 hour drive north of here in Montana.

Below is the tremendous day 1 outlook valid for May 19, 2009

Yawn. I really don’t know what to do for Tuesday. Nothing pops out and screams FUN right now. I really want severe weather, its all that I want right now. This concludes my blog post for day 3.

Sunday brought some absolutely beautiful weather to the area, which made for the perfect sight seeing day. Even though there was no severe weather anywhere in the region, I still had a great time. I took a trip with a buddy to the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Preserve in southwest Oklahoma. We drove around, saw buffalo and longhorn cattle, got great pictures from the top of Mount Scott. Overall I had a fantastic time and got some beautiful pictures and video. I haven’t learned the video editing thing very well yet so enjoy the picture gallery below instead.

For the weather ahead, Monday and Tuesday’s forecasts both call for thunderstorms in Montana which is a 27 hour drive from Texas. These storms may get strong but severe or tornadic is unlikely. Considering this is the only storm risk on the SPC’s site for the next 7 days, it made me consider going all the way up there. However, it is 27 hours away and to drive that by myself would be pretty boring. I figure I will just hang out here in Texas and either do more sight seeing or enjoy a relaxing and quiet day off work. Below is the SPC’s day 1 outlook, valid for Monday May 18 2009

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No storm chasing was to be had on day 1, but there are still 10 more days left to enjoy. Unfortunately the outlook for the next 10 days isn’t that great.

Sunday’s forecast looks to bring some severe weather to Florida with typical afternoon thunderstorms. Sadly these will be the most interesting thing occurring in the country for Sunday. I will likely just go sightseeing around Texas for this Sunday since it is bound to be a beautiful day. Below is the day 1 outlook by the SPC, valid for Sunday May 17 2009.

In the short term, the best severe weather chances I see appear on Tuesday and Wednesday in the central to northern plains of Nebraska and South Dakota. However computer models are forecasting a strong cap in place so storm coverage appears to be limited at best, and non existant at worst. In any event I am planning on heading up to the central plains for Tuesday and Wednesday unless the forecast gets worse.

Thursday looks to be a quiet day at this time across the country so this could be a down day, travel day, or a sightseeing day.

Friday looks like it may have some storms in the southern plains in Texas and Oklahoma but these are 144 hours out and the models at this time do not show much of a severe weather threat.

Saturday looks a little better for severe weather in Oklahoma and Texas. Maximum CAPE values exceeding 2000 J/KG, a weak cap, moderate shearing, and good moisture looks possible. Saturday looks pretty fair at this time.

Sunday appears to set up a boundary stretching the length of tornado alley from the dakotas all the way through the Texas panhandle. This is still 192 hours out so models are having a hard time getting any more specific, but it appears that a severe weather event may occur in the plains for next Sunday.

Monday, Memorial Day also sets up a severe weather event, across a good portion of the country. This appears to stretch from the Texas gulf coast, through the panhandle and up along the western flank of tornado alley. Also a big blob of instability around Kentucky and southern Ohio.

My storm chasing trip begins in a few short hours! With perfect timing, I just received my new HD video recorder. Model is a Canon HF S100, with a 32gb SDHC card. This should give me about 3 hours of full HD quality recording (1920×1080) in either 60i, 30p or 24p on the card.

Now lets just see if i can snap a tornado! This’ll be my first storm chasing trip so I hope to make the most of it.