Living the Dream

Today, we woke up in Omaha, the largest city in the state of Nebraska. The plan was to head south and across state lines to Topeka and wait for the storms to form, and basically come to us. The indices this morning were amazing, and the risk level was at moderate, the first time we have seen that on this trip. Unfortunately, a moderate risk level for severe storms in a bad season for chasing also brings the chance of a mob of chasers flocking to developing supercells.

We left the hotel at half past ten, and headed straight to the capital of Kansas. We ate lunch at Wendy’s and waited for the storms to fire up, hopefully in our vicinity. We spent several hours in that Wendy’s, either tossing the football around and even sleeping in the vans, which were like saunas with the outside temperatures in the 90’s and nearing 100 and dewpoints being very uncomfortable and in the high 60’s and 70s. This reminded me of the muggy conditions I am accustomed to in a common Cincinnati summer.

Sure enough, the minute I got to sleeping in the middle seat of our van, I was awakened by some of the chasers shaking the van and telling us that the storms were beginning to explode just north of us, which actually meant that they were on the Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri border, nearly an hour and a half away. After refueling, we shot north towards Falls City, Nebraska. Two supercells were developing rapidly with CAPE values in the 4000’s, which is an extremely high amount and great for severe weather development.

As we approached, we noticed several chase vehicles and teams stationed all around on small turnoffs and gas stations, but that would only be a precursor to what we would see later. Our cell that we were chasing at first was small, but eventually swallowed the northern supercell and became one, massive cell near the four corners area. We got into a caravan of sorts and headed due east following the quickest storms we had chased this trip. Thirty-five miles per hour doesn’t sound that fast, but catching storms that don’t wait for anything is more difficult than it would at first seem. After our storm got tornado warned, things really started heating up.

We soon passed into our 10th state on this more than seven thousand mile journey trip, Missouri, at about 5 this afternoon, or 6pm in Indiana time. As we passed into the small town of Oregon, Mo, we noticed that we, along with other chasers, were quickly grabbing the attention of the locals. Whether they were watching us from their front porches, in the downtown areas or from their cars, we were clearly making them nervous. The town had just been hit head on by the supercell we were chasing, and on the eastern side of town, our second van stopped momentarily to collect hail samples that were 3 inches in diameter after being on the ground for 20 minutes, so it was safe to assume that it could have been close to grapefruit sized (4 inches) when it first made contact with the surface. This is not only dangerous to property, but livestock and your own life can be quickly ended if you were to be struck with this size of hail.

We kept moving east in pursuit of our supercell that was producing very dangerous conditions, not only to us, but for the residents of the towns that we were passing through. Traffic started picking up at this point, as several teams had pulled off to the side of the road to watch the storm develop and strengthen. Many others like ourselves continued on, fighting the local yahoos who unwisely decided to join in on the chase. There were honestly, hundreds of vehicles and chasers within a few miles on the particular road we were traveling on, including the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), and even Reed Timmer from the Discovery Channel with his SIV that we saw earlier this trip, only this time in action:

We saw several wall clouds and maybe even a funnel at one point, but no tornadoes were visible. There was one report this evening of a tornado in Weatherby , MO that was rain wrapped, or nearly impossible to view from almost any angle. We were less than 5 miles from this tornado, if indeed it was a tornado, but of course we did not see it. We were in perfect position if it would have been visible, but as our luck has been for the entire trip, we saw only a rainbow.

Today was our last say for chasing on the Great Plains. Tomorrow morning, we are heading back to Indiana, but might not get back until late, especially if we decide to chase the storms that are predicted for tomorrow in Illinois and our home state. We have accomplished many things that we never thought we would do on this trip. We have been to 10 different states, from South Dakota to Texas, and from Colorado to Missouri. To accomplish this feat, we traveled over 7000 miles at last check this afternoon. Our furthest travel day was a heck of a haul, when we traveled from Kansas to Texas and booked over 700 miles. We had enough free time to sight see and saw things from the Grassy Knoll to Mt. Rushmore to the Geographic Center of the 48 Contiguous States. We did have our fair share of weather as well on this trip, and it has progressively gotten better as the trip went along. We have met a ton of unique and interesting individuals and groups out here on the plains, including Earth Man at the Colorado Rockies game who got numerous calls on his cell phone from the regulars who wanted beer deliveries from him, many friendly and interested locals, and another collegiate chase team, including some girls I ate dinner with tonight, whose professor Dr. Arnold initiated the Storm Chase Team and basically the whole meteorology department at Ball State before he moved on to a smaller college in Maryland. Meeting new people is always nice, and it is one of my favorite things to do. You can learn vast amounts of information and gain priceless stories and insights from people you would otherwise never have known. Moving on, we started off chasing “SEE TEXT” boxes from the Storm Prediction Center, to supercells the past few days. I have learned more information from this trip about meteorology than I have in my first year of college and possibly even in my life. If I ever get the chance to go storm chasing in the future, I now know how to do so safely and what to look for and how to even forecast my own chasing adventures. Even though we hadn’t seen what we planned to all along, we still saw a lot of great and amazing things, and overall, had a great time meeting and cooperating with one another out here on the Great Plains, chasing storms, and living the dream.

I thank you for following me on this journey, as random or exciting as it might have been at times. If you feel the need to ask any questions or comment on the blog, feel free to contact me at btmaushart@bsu.edu. As always, thanks for reading.

False Alarm

We woke up yesterday in the panhandle of the Sooner State, bright and early. Our goal was to head for western Kansas and head into eastern Colorado at the furthest. We figured that with the highest chance of our trip yet for tornadoes, at 10%, that there would be many other chase groups, and of course yahoos. Yahoos, not the website, rather inexperienced and dangerous locals who roach, or follow experienced chasers towards storms, can be hazardous to not only us, but they can give us, the experienced or student chasers a bad rep.
As we left Oklahoma, we passed into Kansas and after eating lunch in Colby, near the northwestern corner, we stopped at a local motel and borrowed their wireless internet services. We sat there, hoping for storms to form to our west and come in our direction. The "cap" prevented this from happening. Unfortunately for us, storms did fire in Wyoming, and Vortex 2 spotted a decent tornado that lasted 24 minutes. The same cell was tracking east, and with little choices to make in Kansas, we decided to head north, after wasting a vast amount of precious time sitting in that motel parking lot. To intercept, we would have to travel over three hours and flirt with the time zone that separates the mountain and central zones. Coming up on 5 o'clock, we hadn’t seen a rain shaft, few clouds with little or no vertical development, and basically, nothing in favor of us chasing. The day looked like it was going to be a waste of gas, miles, and a huge bust. But, defying all odds against us, we tracked north to the supercells that had a history of producing tornadoes in hopes they might give us, as well as Vortex 2, a chance to see a tornado.
After crossing through 3 states and across the time zone boundary several times, we finally ended up near the southwestern Nebraska border, in Julesburg, CO. The cells were north and west of our position in Bridgeport, NE, moving slow to the east south east. For a day that looked to be the best day possibly of our trip, things were looking bleak. It was nearing 6 and we were just beginning the chase on a storm, for all that we knew could fizzle out and die as we approached from the south.

We decided that our best plan of action was to head for Oshkosh and wait for the storm to come to us, because the road network would limit us to just a few areas to intercept. WE headed down a hilly, and winding country road with the storm, also carrying with it a tornado warning, above and in front of us. The mammatus clouds were crazy compared to what we had seen earlier in the week, and the contrast on the horizon with the low level clouds was phenomenal. Just then, as we headed over some hills, both vans caught sight of an ominous wall cloud in the distance, against an orange sky. VIEW VIDEO:

Within seconds, the cloud appeared to drop a funnel, and the energy level in the van skyrocketed. It was hard to judge the ground level with the hills we were going through, but a cone shaped cloud dropped towards the ground only 15 miles to our north. I had been recording on the video camera the telecommunications department had loaned me, but I also quickly grabbed a hold of my other camera which had video capability and caught the reaction of the van I was in when the cloud appeared to stir up dust on the ground below it. I will take some of the blame for calling it a tornado, but the vast majority of us believed the same thing. There were also 2 other funnel shaped clouds nearby that were dropping out of the low cloud base. Could there be a tornado dropping, or even more than one? We rounded a corner and spotted another girl sitting in a gravel lot near a communications tower, and we parked near her, being it held a great viewpoint over Oshkosh and to where our funnel had just began to vanish, along with all of our hopes. After asking her if she had seen a tornado, she said, “No, but it definitely looked like a funnel perhaps.” It was slightly disheartening, but it was one step closer to our ultimate goal.

We snapped great photos and videos from our vantage point, and also caught a great lightning show. The Vortex group also drove by as well as numerous other chasing groups and individuals. When we finally left our storm, late last night, we passed it seemed, 100 other cars parked along the same road as us, just watching and hoping that the storm would produce, but it did not. We ate dinner at Subway, for the God knows what time this trip at a gas station off of I-80 at 11 last night. The Vortex team, a chase group from Texas Tech, and another DOW from NBC stopped to refuel and wind down at the same station. After dinner, we waited out for the remnants of our storm to move east and away from the highway, because at that time it was dropping softball sized hail. If we wouldn’t have waited, our trip would have been quickly ended with the destruction of our vans. We did not pull into our hotel until half past one this morning, and didn’t get to sleep until somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.

This morning we woke up a bit late, for obvious reasons, and headed out to Lincoln for lunch and now we are camped out at a Phillips 66 gas station waiting for storms to pop up in the area. Vincennes University and the National Severe Storms Laboratory are also here, as well as many other groups here in Nebraska City, just south and east of Lincoln near the border of Missouri and Iowa. I’m going to try to add more videos to this page and other earlier posts. I forgot that you could do this, so now you can enjoy some real storm chasing action. Comments are always appreciated, and you can contact me at btmaushart@bsu.edu. Thanks for reading.

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.