Train vs. Tornado

This video says it all.

Mike

The rest of story

You've seen the damage in the previous post, but here are the details:

• Hundreds of excellent hail dents - hard to take a good picture of
• He has 6 external driving lamps - 3 now busted (so much for the 23 year warranty)
• Paint peeled off the driving lamps
• My Garmin GPS 18 puck that sits on the roof - smashed, so at the moment, there is no APRS location reporting (check the last update on the tracking page to see where that happened) or we might have spotternetwork running on the laptop
  
• Windshield moulding busted
• Peeled the paint off the roof rack

• Did NOT break the windshield - all luck in that
• Everything else seems fine

Then again, how can someone who is hired to storm chase NOT have dimples in his car. :)

From the beginning, we watched this storm build from SE of Wichita Falls. We had time to kill, so we drove over into it and just got rained on. Then, the hail games started. Ron wanted me to drive through the core of the storm to see what the hail was really like.

The first time, it was pee sized. By about the 5th time, it was quarter sized. A few hours later (now dark) and driving by GPS and radar, it was huge. Possibly tennis ball. We still need to check the video to see what it was.

As it plays out, there was 1 storm building as it should (and how Ron predicted) - right on schedule. We zig zagged our way around county roads and found a place on the north side of the storm where we could watch the rotation and even captured a few pics of it. We could hear the hail coming from behind us with little bits falling. Our pictures do show a small funnel starting to form.

As it started to get bigger, we jumped back into the car and headed east. Now, we are stuck and just getting hammered on by hail while we worked our way back to the SE in order to get south of the rotation and down to a highway that we could catch up to it with. We spent the next hour following it, but never saw it dropped to the ground.

Just before it started to collapse (and the number 2 cell following it), we headed north back into the core area. The sun had just set and of course it was getting dark. We are on a dirt/gravel road headed east with the storm and Ron carefully watching the Baron radar which has our position plotted on the screen. The wind was howling and it was really really pouring rain.

I think that it was shortly after that that we were sitting in the notch of the storm, Ron in a very very calm voice saying, it might be good if you backup a little. I guess he didn't want me to put it in the ditch. (Didn't I see that scene in Twister -- but there was no bridge near by to hide in). It blew by and we headed back to St. Jo Texas. Now, the tornado sirens are going off and we decided to top up on gas.

The 2nd storm is bearing down on St. Jo and from the track we can see, it will pass just south of the town. Several people stop to talk to us and everyone who owns a car they care about is parked in gas stations or car washes. Ron talks to a Lady to let her know she actually moved closer to the storm and says she is safer back home. We think her brand new Buick was only weeks old.

We paced the storm for about 5 or 6 hours, calling it quits near Sherman Texas when one of the cells totally collapsed - on us - in about 100mph shear winds and a ton of rain. I will post some pictures later as well as some video on my web site.

As I write this, we are headed into Longview TX and might have to head over to Louisianna for our last intercept of this trip. It beats driving over to Amarillo TX or back into Oklahoma, both of which are dealing with blizzard warnings and over a foot of snow. And me with only my Teva's newly acquired from Mountain Coop just before I left.

Ron made me do it

Wednesdays Gum Ball Ralley

If you are ever in Texarkana TX, do NOT stay at the Motel 6.  It more like a hotel 1.  No internet (just how can that happen), and it goes downhill from there.  Need I say more.

We got up pretty early to head across TX to the west with the first stop in Dallas to get online.  While do have an air card with us in the car, it is of the slower variety and it doesn't fit in my newer laptop (it has one of the smaller PCMCIA ports -- yes, there is such a thing).

We headed across TX and then south cross country towards Austin.  The closest we got to it was about 1 mile, but there was so much rain, we never got to see it.  Then, we headed East on a winding dirt road towards Austin.  But this is not the plains.  More like the roads in Muskoka, and we couldn't quite catch up with it.

Watching the news from Austin, we can see that this storm dropped some pretty big hail and caused LOTS of damage.  The hail was punching holes right through windshields.  Read about it here.

Last night, once we got to Temple TX, dinner was across the highway at the Texas Roadhouse.  If you are ever in the area, you need to make sure you stop there.  This place BLOWS the Texan away in Amarillo.  And, make sure you get Kaylyn to serve you.  This young lady just 'gets it.  Besides, she needs new tires on  her car and could use a big tip.

Now (at 9:30 local time), there is a storm dropping 3" hail to the south of us.  But, it is totally foggy and we can't see a thing.  To add to that, there is a forecast of 12 to 18 inches of snow up north in the panhandle.  I guess I should have packed boots.

I've updated my photo gallery with the latest pictures.

If you click on the 'map this' part of the gallery, you can see exactly where some of the pictures are taken.

North or south.. we are not sure yet where we are going today, but we don't have to go far.

Only 800k's (ish) so far today

We had this great idea to blast over to Little Rock Arkansas to see what we could see today. Thoughts of a great squall line danced in our heads. Not far... only 600k or so (maybe more, maybe less).

Well, there was lots happening. On the Baron Radar, we could see several Macro bursts with a downdraft in the 100mph range. One of them seemed to be 50k wide. But, we couldn't get to it as it was in the mountains of Arkansas and both Ron and I have too many teeth to go there.

So, Ron decided he wanted a Double Quarter Pounder. We now know why McDonalds is such a great stock to buy. Ron opens the nice box his hamburger came in only to find 1 (not 2) patties. He is pretty sure that they can't count past 1 here. Last I saw Ron, he was negotiating for the other patty.

Nothing really good in the way of pictures today. Sort of like chasing in Ontario. We are still on the road at this time on I30W headed to Texarkana Texas (remember Smoky and the Bandit?). Some big accident on the I30 is slowing us down. Might have something to do with all the water that is falling from the sky.

Tomorrow will be just as long as we head to the OTHER side of Texas.

Again, you can watch our track here.

Monday's adventures

As we left Hays KS, the surface winds were just howling out of the south.  Not only were they blowing dogs of chains, the wool was getting blown off the sheep.  We measured the winds at great than 30 knots on more than one occasion.  That is over 60kph.  Now, that doesn't sound like much, but it will blow you off your feet.

On our drive to Wichita KS, half of it was with the wind trying to blow us off the road from right to left.  The other half was driving into a head wind.  We saw 2 traffic accidents directly caused by the winds where trailers were blown off the road.

As the storms weren't scheduled to pop until later in the day, we had time for yet another trip to Best Buy and a lunch stop at a place were you could pay your $7.99 and eat all the meat you want.  A place called the Golden Corral.  I think they filmed 'Super Size Me' there.

About 50km's south of Wichita, we crossed behind the only storm of the day we chased.  It had a rotating couplet on it and some pretty good shear.  With good roads, we turned to the East and into the parade of chasers.  It was one of those storms that wanted to drop to the ground, but it did great a funnel and a pretty good wall cloud.  Not too bad considering it is March.  For the next 3 hours, we worked our way across KS in a NE direction, criss crossing both dirt and paved roads.  In our of our cross country treks with Ron driving on a dirt road (actually, it was more of a crushed bolder road) I could tell by the map that it might go down into a valley.  I look up and see a deer bolt out and then stop as we blow by.  We have that on video somewhere, and once I get a chance to look through the video camera we have in the back, I will see what it captured.

Someone reported to the SPC that there was a brief touchdown, but we honestly believe that it might have just been rear flank winds.  We stayed with this thing from about 3:30pm until the sunset at 7:30 and it never really got organized enough to drop to the ground.

Since we had already picked up our hotel room back in Witchitka, we headed back, stopped at anIHOP for a quick snack and called it a night.

Now, as I write this, Ron tells me that it is 3C.  I say.. "In Toronto?".  No, he says... outside the hotel.  ARRGGHHH   It was 24C when we got back to the hotel last night.  Where are my shoes???  I've been living in Teva's for the last few days.

That means, we are headed east to Missouri and then south where it is warmer.

Sadly - Sunday was a bust

Ron and I traversed Kansas into Nebraska and back into Kansas.  About 800 or more kilometers.  Things just didn't pop and everything was really fast moving.  Surface winds reached 30 knots in several places (and that is what we measured with my Kestral).

We pulled into North Platt for lunch with this screeching coming out of the rear of the car.  Sounded like a break had fallen apart.  We had lunch and then decided to take the wheel off just by a Napa Auto Parts just in case we needed parts.  After all, how hard can a drum brake be?  Good news is that it turned out to be just some rust that had fallen into the drum.  We found that doing 130kph down I80 to the West for a few hundred K's seemed to solve the problem.

Now, today, should be a great day for later in the day.  We are going to head into eastern Kansas.

If your headed down here at some point, we have found that the Econo Lodge has been really inexpensive (under $50 a night and even less) and their Internet really rocks.  Don't stay anywhere where you have to pay for Internet, as there is always an option just down the street.

Lunch in St. Louis

We had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings here in St. Louis.  Not only that, we got to meet Kevin and his Dan.  Dan was there for lunch and was then off to his special Olympics basketball tournament later in the afternoon.  Younge Dan just loves severe weather, so he had a blast talking to us.  We should him some pictures from 2007.  Not only that, he will be in Toronto mid April for a hockey tournament in North York.  Good luck Dan!

Having arrived here in Salina KS, all I can hear is Ron looking through models for Monday.  He just keeps saying, Oh My God.  Over and over and over.

Tomorrow, we need to head up to Nebraska for a mid afternoon event.  But, before I go, I need to 'borrow' a menu for Jacque-Henri from Tag Heuer in Switzerland from IHOP.  JH was with us at Lake Placid 2 weeks ago for a meeting with my timing colleagues and he did make sure he got his fill of American deep fried food.  Nothing like that Grand Slam from Denny's.

What do you think?

Could this be a gravity wave?

I caught this from the car just before sunset.

Still on the road (what a surprise)

It turns out we spent about an hour waiting to cross the border at Port Huron, MI. There wasn't that many cars, but the guy was thorough. He had an entire new definition of questions, like... 'why are you coming into the US to watch severe weather?'.

At the moment, we have about 156k to go to get to the hotel tonight. We still haven't decided exactly where to head to on Saturday, but odds are that we will head towards Colorado.

The drive has been good. Not a cloud in the sky and it has warmed up to 7C. We are a few hundred K's south of Chicago.

The start of the 2009 Season

Here we go. So far, we have traveled about 1/2 an inch -- I write this as I wait for the customs guy to let us into the US here in Sarnia.

We have until Sunday to get to our first event. No rush, as today is Friday.. I think.

Thanks to Ron's unlimited US broadband with Verizon, we should be able to provide some nice timely updates. For those of you that understand APRS, we are beaconing with va3mw-9. Clicking here should work.

Ted...there might be live to web... Stay tuned.. :)

Last Day - Headed Home

We spent most of Thursday trying to catch up with the storms we intercepted in Murdo SD. After breakfast, we bugged out and headed east along I90 doing warp factor 9, however that storm front was really moving fast. Our target area was Wisconsin.

For those of you in Ontario, it was the storm that hit Toronto on Friday afternoon.

We finally managed to get ahead of it at about Madison Wisconsin. By that point in time, we had heard that it had done damage all around Wisconsin with trees being blown over in the North and buildings damaged to the south.

You really can't predict this type of storm, as it was not a traditional Tornado type of storm like we had been chasing for 2 solid weeks. There were very strong winds from the South that feed this front. Along I90, we had tail winds that my have hit at least 50 mph. Great on the gas mileage.

As we passed in front of it in Madison, we pulled into a farmers field to watch it pass. As it went by us, it fell apart and sadly, the storm behind started to do the same thing as the sun set.

We called it a day at that point and pulled into a Mexican food emporium for Margaritas and Burritos (as well as just about any other Mexican fare). What an amazing meal. You can ask Scott VE3IPE how is meal was. Apparently he had the joy of dealing with it again at about 2am Friday morning. There is some story about Pam being on the floor of the Men's washroom that she can explain if you ask her. There might even be video.

What was left on Friday morning was a very long drive back to Ontario. Nothing special other than we watched the live radar on the Baron on the way home. We could see the cells popping up around southwestern Ontario and all the rotation that may have caused some damage. It was too bad that we weren't half a day ahead and we could have done some chasing in Ontario.

Over the past 2 weeks, we travelled over 13,000km's and roughly $2500 in fuel. Hotels for the 9 of us was approximately $7000. We had been as far away as New Mexico and about 9000 washrooms (all looked the same-some better, some worse). Many wall/shelf clouds and all types of Funnel clouds. 1 Stove Pipe Tornado and 3 others. We had 9 people comfortably in 2 vehicles and no one killed anyone. It is very easy to eat bad food (ie: junk) on a trip like this. Hard to find healthy food all the time.

I invested in some new camera equipment (there is a surprise). The lightning trigger worked well on the Nikon D200. Not so good on the Nikon D1, however, I didn't spend much time trying it on the D1. The shot I didn't get was the daytime shot I was taking of a rainbow and then then there was a lightning strike in it. Had I used the trigger, I would have had an amazing shot. Oh well, that is photography.

There is nothing like sitting watching a perfectly formatted wall cloud rotating in front of you. Or, sitting in the car with hail pounding all around you with the incredibly strong winds from a rear flank downdraft shaking the car (this has nothing to do with Scott and Mexican food).

We saw a lot of Texas (as well as many other states). We all agree that there is a lot of poverty in that area of the US. Lots of abandoned buildings. We drove right through downtown Amarillo at high noon on a Monday in about 10 minutes. Where were all the people??

If your interested in going on a storm chase, don't do it alone and don't do it without someone who can do their own forecasting. Tornado Alley is a very large place and you can spend days driving around and not see anything. I would highly recommend Ron Gravelle (http://www.stormchasing.ca/). Ron is passionate about severe weather. He does his own forecasting and he will take the time to explain to you what is going on. Ron is even available for day trips in Ontario if you chose. As a client, he treated us with class. After 2 weeks, I consider Ron and his wife Sandra to be good friends. If you like a dry sense of humor, he is your guy!

We have just cleared customs at Port Huron. Next stop Tim Horton's for some tea (except for Dave who bolted for Starbucks). No big issues at the border. The wind is from the north and the temparature is the lowest we have seen in 2 weeks (16c). Nice sunset to west.

Would I do this again? Absolutely. And, I would make sure it was with Ron. What a blast. All good fun.

Wednesday's Chase - sadly, a bust

The day started out with a drive north. Way north into South Dakota. On our way, and a visit to a fire tower later, we visited some tornado damage from early in May. Pictures are on the web site at the bottom of page 8. http://www.portcredit.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14&page=8. The owner of the house was in his tractor when the Tornado almost wiped out his home. He says he is luckly to be alive. You can see the damage on the shots. Just a reminder of how much force is actually there.

Make sure you check out the Pizza Hut delivery schedule as well on page 9! ;)

We had great expectations for Wednesday. It was a Tornado Armagedon. The (weather) models were all great. The timing was great. We intercepted the shelf clould right on time. The SPC had been using the OUTBREAK word all day long. Every forcast had identified areas for F2-F5 damage.

Then, it just died. Right in front of us. Died. Dead. Nada. Nothing. We figure the summer students must have been running the models. Thanks for coming out. Let's head home.

Not sure what is on tap for today. We might have to press to make it to the west side of Lake Michigan and see what we can catch up to.

Wednesday morning update

Not much to post from yesterday, other than it is a long drive from New Mexico to Kansas. Just to give you an idea, you have to remember that Tornado Alley is 1 driving day wide and 3 driving days long. It is easy to get into the right state to look for a Tornado, but to get to the point were you can see a 15 minute event takes real art. This means finding the intersection of 2 roads and being safe at the same time. This is one of Ron's most amazing skills.

As an example, there is a team from Australia here. When we talked to them a week ago, they had been here for 6 weeks and had not seen 1 Tornado. I hope that they have honed their forecasting skills in the last 6 weeks.

What else is pretty strange, is that with all the hotels and restaurants, we continue to run into the same chasers at the same hotels and restaurants. Just plain weird.

Today, we expect an outbreak of Tornados. We also expect this system to track west and possibly be in Ontario by Friday or Saturday. This is good as we can start to work our way home and track this storm system at the same time.

We continue to get good flow (of wind) from the south east which brings the moisture up from the Gulf of Mexico. This is one key ingrediant to producing a Tornado. There are about 6 other key things you have to throw into the pot before you start to stir it and get a Tornado.

Time will tell.... Off to breakfast.

BTW, yesterday's pics are at http://portcredit.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14&page=8

Monday - nothing special

Short update today. We are headed north. Way north. All the way back to North Platte South Dakota. The forecast is for a large outbreak for tomorrow and Thursday.

Highlight of yesterday was our visit to the Alien capital of the world. Roswell New Mexico. Pictures are on page 7 starting at http://portcredit.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14&page=7.

We watched the funnel clouds to the west of us on our drive into Roswell. They were about 100kms away. We chose not to chase it, but it did drop a small tornado.

We've done almost 7000km since we left.

Sunday June 3rd - success

We had great success today. Although we only got to within 18kms of the Tornado, we could see that it wa a big one. It only stayed on the ground for a few minutes and likely would have produced significant damage had it been near a populated area.

Then, as the wall cloud approached, I managed to get some pretty good shots of this anti-cyclonic rotation. I'm trying to assemble them into a movie and hope to have that posted shortly.

Ron is absolutely amazing with his ability to get us this close. You have to imagine the forecasts that come out daily from the SPC are very broad in nature. You can drive for days in each directon with the forecast area. For him to get this down to just an intersection is amazing.

Today's pictures start here. http://portcredit.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14&page=6.

You'll see that I'm getting more and more daylight pictures with lightning in them. However, I also managed to get some dust on my camera CCD. Hopefully I can clean that off while I'm on the road.

Saturday's Chase - June 2, 2007

Well, we thought Saturday was going to be a bust, but it worked out OK in the end.

Lessons learned yesterday. It is faster to do a take out order at a very crowded Denny's and then go join everyone else to eat it. Scott was volunteered to drive some of us to Starbucks and then come back and meet everyone at Denny's. When we got back, they had ordered, but the place was packed and the service was slow. So, Scott ordered his Egg's over MyHammy, got it in about 4 minutes and then sat down with everyone else to eat it. Now, I might question eating at Denny's in the first place, but this is the US of A.

Next, you can find wireless Internet at McDonald's (yet another fine eating establishment----not). However, if you go ask for the coupon, you can get an hour of free Internet. The trick is finding someone at the counter that knows what the Internet or WiFi actually is and then finding a manager who actually can find the free coupons. We are 1 for 3 in actually getting online at McDonald's. So, we continue to go to our backup plan. Just about any hotel now has free WiFi.

The drive from Wichita Falls to Lubbock is one of the most boring drives I've been on. Not only that, there is hundreds of miles of 4 lane highway for almost no cars. Just amazing. Must be the home of the President.

Ron got to the camera store he wanted to visit (thanks Stuart and Michele--you both gave us the same information, however Ritz camera is no longer in business). Not that it was a competition, but Michele came through first. He is now the proud owner of a new 10-22mm lens for his Canon Camera, not without an argument with Scotia Visa who decided that it really wasn't him at the end of the card.

Now, to the chase (no pun intended). We had thought that today was a bust, but at about 7pm (with Dave and I looking to find a hockey game to watch), Ron came by and said there was a supercell north of the city (about an hour away). We tore out of town to the north and just barely crossed in front of it as the sun was setting. That included running down some very narrow dry dirt roads (you don't want to be on them when it rains as you will get stuck).

We kept in front of it trying to get some good pictures. At one point we could hear the 1" hail pinging the ground all around us and off the cars. Dave took a direct hit on the lip as well. Then, there was this noise...and we could hear this wall of hail headed towards us. We all scattered into the cars just as it hit. Wow, now that was impressive.

We tracked this storm as it merged with 3 others for about 4 hours. Apparently once it got into Lubbock, it produced a Tornado (yet to be confirmed) to the west of us. We also heard that there was 3" hail in it at places.

Pictures are at http://portcredit.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14&page=6.

We are headed to the west of Lubbock today.

Friday - Witcheta Falls TX

Home of the 1979 F5 Tornado that went right through the town.

The day started with what looked like an 8 hour drive south again towards and into Amarillo. Just as we left the hotel, we ran across the TIV - Tornado Intercept Vehicle. You read more about this here. Not sure if I would go for a ride in this thing or not. Short story is they are trying to get some Imax video from the inside of a Tornado. And, 2 guys get to go along for the ride.

At lunch time we could tell from the Threat Net (our mobile radar) that the only possible Tornado in our area was to the SE of Amarillo and it was moving away at about 20mph. So, that means we really had to haul butt to overtake this storm. The road gods were in our favour, so we managed to do that by about 5pm. We had to stay to the paved roads as all the secondary roads were just flood from the storms previous this week. If you've never been here, Texas, like the rest of the plains, is just 1 flat bowl with no where for the water to flow to. So, it just sits in the fields and ditches.

We punched one of the smaller cores (of the storm) and then stopped to get gas. Now, this station doesn't look like much (photo here), but it also served dinner. I saw an amazing meat and potatoes dinner on several plates, and I could have stopped there for dinner, but we had to go. If it hadn't been the only gas in town, we wouldn't have even thought about having dinner here.

Just as Ron was pumping gas, there was one great nearby ligthning strike.. and I mean near. We all scattered inside while we left Ron holding the nozzle. Ben added his encoragement by telling him he was recording him on video just in case something happened.

Sadly, this storm just didn't want to get organized for us. It was the only Tornado watch box in the US at the time, so, we were in the right place. The scud cloud was trying to get sucked in, but again, no joy. As it started to loose definition, we called it a day and headed back north and had to punch another core. Lots of water... little hail.

I also got a chance to get the daytime lightning trigger to work. I was able to take pictures of the lightning from a moving chase vehicle. It took alot of setup on the Nikon D200 to get it to work, but it is doable. Here is one picture of it in action.

Our Garmn Nuvi coughed up a Steak House for us to chow down at. The Garmin has about a 50/50 chance of actually giving us something current. This time there was success and we had a great meal.

Yesterdays pictures start here.

First Major Storm

Long day today. If you look at the shot here, you'll see the rain core and the funnel attempting to form just to the right. This picture was taken with a very wide angle lens.

We drove north to do an intercept in the Oklahoma Panhandle. To say the least, we weren't disappointed. Once we got to Hooker (home of the Hooker Horny Toads), we headed west into Colorado and intercepted a monster set of cells.



Like flies to honey, we ended up with at least 40 cars of chasers driving down county dirt roads. At one time we were all parked look at a wall cloud that just wanted to drop a tornado. We saw many funnels, but no luck on a Tornado.



The short story is that we chased this storm for 5 hours until the sun set. We punched the core several times as we had no choice. Several times we had dime sized hail and the odd time up to a quarter. The rear flanking outflow winds were nothing short of amazing. Wild guess would put them in the 70mph range.



We chased it all the way into Guymon KS, where, at that point, the sun set and we called it a day. This storm oh so wanted to spawn a tornado, but it was not to be. Ron had said the actual core was over 20 miles wide at several points.



This is the short story tonight. We got in late, and have to depart early for New Mexico for tomorrow's tour.



Today's pictures are at http://portcredit.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=14&page=4.