Category: Storm Chase

Saturday was probably my favorite storm chase ever, and probably my most successful. As you can see in the pictures below, I saw four tornadoes from a good distance and got some great pictures and video. Furthermore, the tornadoes were, for the most part, in the middle of open fields. The first one was the…

This was my first storm chase of 2013. While it was a Moderate Risk for parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Missouri, it was only a Slight Risk for northern Illinois. I honestly was not expecting much on this chase, I mostly just wanted to see some weather. I started off heading west, towards Dekalb.…

This day was one of the first storm chases since I had moved back to Illinois. And then, all I really did was drive a block away from my house to an empty parking lot. Anyway, a thunderstorm (I don’t remember if it was severe warned or not,) was approaching Elgin, so I jumped in…

April 14th was the second and final High Risk day issued by the Storm Prediction Center in 2012. It was the peak of a three day severe weather outbreak, and six people lost their lives. I had originally targeted north-central Oklahoma, in the southern portion of the High Risk area. By the morning of the…

The April 13th storm chase was kind of a spur of the moment thing. If I remember correctly, the tornado probabilities were not that high, the next day looked better, and I had work later that day. However, some isolated supercells began to fire up not that far southwest of Norman, so I decided to…

Alyson and I left Norman at around 10 AM, heading to our initial target area of Vernon, TX. One of my biggest concerns for this day was the timing of thunderstorm initiation. It the storms didn’t fire up early enough, it would be dark before we saw anything. Luckily, this did not happen. By the…

So I started my chase day a little after that PDS Tornado Watch was issued. I jumped in my car and left Norman, heading towards Chickasha. Storms had already started firing in the west before I left, and I decided to continue further west from Chickasha to Anadarko. When I got there, I pulled into…

Today was what as know to storm chasers as “the day before the day.” It had all the parameters for a pretty decent severe weather outbreak, and indeed, plenty of supercells did fire off. However, the main show will ultimately be tomorrow, in which a major tornado outbreak is possible. Overall, I would rate today…

I’ll start by saying that I didn’t necessarily have the highest confidence in going into Wednesday. The forecast models just had not been doing a good job of predicting what might happen that day. Indeed, the forecast models had been having trouble that whole week it had seemed like. They had been initializing wrong, and…

I started out the day targeting Paris, TX. My original intention was to get to Paris, adjust in any direction that I needed to, and just wait for the storms to come to me. I did get a bit of a late start; I didn’t get on the road until about 12:30. I flew south…