Joplin, Missouri Six Months Later
I stopped in Joplin again during my latest drive back to Illinois. It was nearly six months to the day since the monstrous EF-5 tornado tore through the city, and killed 160 people. Much progress has been made since my last drive through Joplin. Just about all of the debris and wreckage has been cleaned…
Storm Chase of August 4, 2012
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…
Storm Chase of April 14th, 2012
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…
Storm Chase of April 13th, 2012
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…
Storm Chase of 7 November, 2011
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…
Joplin, Missouri EF-5 Tornado Damage.
This wasn’t actually a storm chase. Alyson and I were on our way to Elgin, IL for my brother’s wedding, and we stopped in Joplin along the way. The destruction we saw there was incredible; unimaginable. And this was three or four weeks after the tornado had gone through. Below are some of the pictures…
Storm Chase of 24 May, 2011
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…
Storm Chase of 23 May, 2011
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…
Storm Chase of 11 May, 2011
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…
Storm Chase of 26 April, 2011
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…