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.. :)