Everything just might be BIGGER in Texas

I haven't posted a new blog for days now, and again I apologize. The days are seeming to blend together the longer we are out here and the past few days, except for today, have been nothing short of exciting, long lasting, and full of firsts. Lets begin with Monday, as best as I can recall it. It has been a while.

This Monday, we began our day in Grand Island, NE, or so I think we did, like I said, it has been a long time, and a lot of good stuff has happened since then. We found that our great chase location was just to the south, and we went into Kansas to monitor building clouds and storms in Belleville. Just over the border to the south of Nebraska. We were only in the town itself for a short time because the storms rapidly exploded on radar, and of course in real life just over our heads. As they moved slightly north east, they picked up in intensity and thunderstorm warnings were placed for neighboring counties. We obligated to travel back north across the border and back into Nebraska, to somewhere around Beatrice to be specific, as we monitored the severe weather just outside of our windows. Of course, this would be the time that WIBC in Indianapolis called my cell phone asking for an interview. I couldn't refuse their offer, and I gave a short 5-10 minute interview with Steve Simpson about our journey and what we were up to. After finally being able to tell him we were chasing storms, he said several times that he wish he had a voice like mine and he thought broadcasting would be a great route for me to go out of college. That made me feel great after spending endless hours couped up in our chase vans.

This turned out to be a great day for chasing as we spent every minute from about noon until the late afternoon. We saw our first bit of storm rotation, as spotted by yours truly, just overhead of the vans on Monday. It wasn't as scary as it was a great video taking opportunity. This eventually went to turn into a mesocyclone, or a precursor to a wall cloud and then a tornado, just to be blunt. There is much more involved, but I'd rather keep you awake to keep reading on. Anywho, seeing a mesocyclone for the first time on the trip was a great accomplishment compared to previous garbage weather we had been experiencing the previous days. Other than a lot of cloud to ground lightning, one bolt of which struck directly across the road from us and our first mesocyclone, we didn't see much in the way of photogenic weather phenomena. But it was a great afternoon nevertheless. After heading south and east to Topeka for dinner, we pushed on into darkness to Emporia, Kansas to sleep for the night, unknowing of the "super" day that would be coming in the morning.

We woke up in Emporia, most of us, before 6 am. This was early, since most of us hadn't gotten to sleep until 2 am that morning. It was my day, as well as another younger student's day to come up with a "game plan" so to say at our morning weather briefing. This was to include where we should shoot for, what we were to expect, the probabilities, etc. I don't think we could have done any better. My target zone, as crazy and impossible as it sounded on Tuesday morning, was somewhere between Childress and Wichita Falls, both of which are in Texas. Being two state lines away in south central Kansas, many of the students and even the faculty were hesitant of pressing that far south for storms which hadn't even show up on radar or visible satellite. But we headed south anyway, for better indices for severe weather and the hope for being able to chase it.

We soon crossed into Oklahoma for the first time, my 7th new state on this trip, via US 35 South. After looking again at the indices on our on board laptops, I still thought that Texas looked the best, although many other students were thinking storms would pop up in the panhandle of Oklahoma. So instead of taking the originally planned, fast exit lunch, someone insisted that we sit down and eat. And naturally, we did, and left Perry Oklahoma at around 1pm. This is when things started to get exciting.

We got back on US 35 South and planned to stop again in Oklahoma City to revamp our game plan, but just before we got there, two discrete cells popped up as light rain showers on our radar just east of Lubbock, Texas, over 350 miles away from where we were. So we kept our eyes on them, and soon enough, like I had predicted, they looked very much like the radar signature of a classic "supercell." They also contained vast amounts of moisture and shear, both of which are needed for tornadoes to form. The chase was on.

After speeding out of Oklahoma City, we headed south west on 44 towards Wichita Falls, TX. The supercellular structures were exploding off of the charts and it would be a race against time to reach them before they turned into rather unchaseable squall lines. We got passed by a three car caravan of storm chasers, but Dr. Call has a competitive side when it comes to chasing, and we followed them very closely for about 75 miles until they eventually had to turn off for gas, at which point he muttered, "Suckers...,"at which point our van erupted in laughter, because this side of Dr. Call comes out only so often. In the mid afternoon, we crossed into the "Lone Star State," my 8th new state since leaving on the 22nd, and speed towards the slow moving and ever growing cells, due east of Lubbock. A third cell had just started to form and grow extremely rapidly in the high levels of CAPE and favorable air. This was our new target, because the other two supercells had conjoined and created more of a high precipitation blob than a favorable, and slightly more predictable discrete cell. We were quickly losing track of time and distance, and we honestly didn't care, because at this point we were headed directly for our cell that was south and east of Abeline, TX. At about 100 miles out, we began to view the outflow of the storm, which consisted of a seemingly flat layer of stratus clouds, rounded and appeared as though to be a piece of paper suspended in the sky. This just went to show how intense the storm would be when we finally got within chasing distance.

I got lost in the back roads and small towns of Texas, but I do remember a lot of our chasing, video taping and photography was within a 20 mile radius of the small town of Comanche, TX. This was our first real taste of what the Great Plains had to offer us weather wise. I'll try to keep the summary short, because most of the afternoon and late evening was chaotic to say the least. This was because as close as we were, we had to avoid getting run over by the freight train of precipitation in the forms of heavy rain and hail that this cell was producing. One slip up and our vans windows could have been shattered and destroyed by 2 inch hail, or that similar to the size of an egg or lime that our cell was capable of producing. The great things we witnessed were many rotating clouds, or mesocyclones, good signs of shear on varying levels, great mammatus clouds, which were the sign of strong updrafts, and a lot of lightning. All these, and also the long lasting nature of the storm, allowed us to categorize it as a supercell. We did have one close run in after watching a rotating mesocyclone that I would like to tell you about. We were watching it from the side of a country road, near a cow farm. Just after we pulled off to get a better view, almost everyone saw a large cloud of dust start to kick up. Normally this would be very exciting, except for the fact that this could of dust, for all we know that could have been the base of a forming tornado, was only a mere 50 yards tops across a field from our vans. Most of us were very excited, but we all knew we had to get a move on very quickly. Fortunately we weren't harmed in any way, but there was also no tornado. Either way, it was very exciting. We made our last play on the south end of the storm, near Comanche, where shear had been picked up in a mesocyclone. This had lowered itself to a very respectable level, but of course, nothing ever came of it. We darted back through town just before the bulk of the storm moved through, prompting a flood warning in that county, as we were heading north, out of its path. We decided to call it a day, and booked a hotel outside of Ft. Worth, Texas. In just this one day, we set a record for traveling over 700 miles. If we would have traveled the same distance, only eastward, we could have made it back, with a few miles to spare, to Muncie.

We woke up this morning in Ft. Worth, after the cells we were chasing the previous day had expanded into a squall line and smashed into the area over night. Contrary to popular belief, it was actually a relaxing sound to sleep with. Our plans for today were to sleep in a bit and catch up on necessary sleep, as well as to get the oil changed in our vans, since we have booked 5000+ miles already, and to sight see in downtown Dallas.

We stopped in Ft. Worth for Wal-Mart and lunch, and then headed east to Dallas. Our first stop was the new Cowboys Stadium, in the community of Arlington, just between Dallas and Ft. Worth. The word to describe it is, well there is no real good word worthy of its description. The stadium itself if state of the art, like you would expect for a stadium that cost over $2.2 billion from what I had heard. It is just absolutely enormous, with a 60 yard long, HD replay screen, retractable roof and side walls, and loads of parking lots. One of our classmates also got interviewed by a Dallas news station about what he thought about the stadium. That segment was supposed to air sometime tonight in Dallas. After finally getting to beautiful downtown Dallas, or next stop was the "6th Floor Museum" in Daley Plaza. This was the site of the infamous JFK Assassination. We took an audio tour that lasted over an hour and a half, and took several pictures outside and I even met a man that claimed he was there, only a little boy at the time, that JFK was assassinated, and even had a picture of himself as the motorcade passed in front of him, exactly 24 seconds prior to the horrific event. After leaving the museum, we headed out of downtown and north towards our dinner and lodging city for the night, Wichita Falls. We ate at an amazing steakhouse, and I can honestly say I spent too much, but the food was well worth it. We might end up living on fast food for the next few days anyway, the way the weather is looking. This is where I am writing this now, from a Best Western in downtown Wichita Falls. Tomorrow's weather is looking good for another busy day of chasing, and our luck has been getting better and better every day, so I hope it continues into tomorrow. I better leave you for now, because its getting late, and we have an early morning ahead of us. I appriciate comments or suggestions, and you can contact me by email at btmaushart@bsu.edu and as always, thank you for keeping up with my travels and enjoy reading.