Mother's Day, KU Graduation, Chasing this Weekend

I haven't had time to post about Mother's Day, in which, I cooked my mother some authentic Mexican food (as it's the only thing I will cook) and took some pictures of a hummingbird and finches in her yard. What a beautiful day it was for Mother's Day after that front blasted through the day before.





And this past weekend, my girlfriend, Devin and I helped set up a party for her sister Rachel's KU graduation. On the way over there I was in a hurry and got a nice, hefty speeding ticket of $246, near my house on the backroads trying to make up time before it! I dropped Devin's mom and youngest sister off, while Kasey (oh yes, another sister of Devin's!) and I parked my car clear on 8th and Mississippi, and walked clear up to the top of the hill. I'm still pretty pissed off and could have choked some people who just had to move in front of me as she was walking by, but I snapped at least one good picture of Rachel! Rachel will be interning for 1 year before becoming a teacher! She definitely will not disappoint those who will be lucky enough to be in her classroom.






Looks like Doug, Derek, Jordan and I will be heading out to chase Thursday, Friday and Saturday and will meet up with Darin and Alexis sometime on Friday when they get back from Boston.

I also talked with Brandon Ivey because I noticed in his April 23, 2007 video that he shot those tornadoes in the exact same spot as we did for the Greensburg wall cloud.



I'll probably make more updates in the next few days, as the target area becomes more clear. We should be streaming live video again on TornadoVideos.Net and our website TornadoLive.Com all weekend long.

Rounds 2 and 3 in SE KS.

EDIT: I wrote this last Friday, but couldn't get the images to upload...

Chase Report for May 10th HERE.

Some pictures and video captures below as I have become lazy at writing as of lately, but the chase report is in the link above.














I'm done with school till June 2nd when my summer class starts!! What a crappy chase year this has been as of this writing. 2006 is starting to look like a dream season compared to 2008 (it was good to us, with 4 successful tornado days, which was a HIGH number).

Storms have been in the same area the last few chases, with the same disorganized looks to them minus the Oswego supercell, which of course was about to probably mimic the Picher OK storm before being engulfed by it. Tuesday never looked good at all, with one of those elongated banana surface lows (which rarely produce anything noteworthy), with the better low level winds 200 miles east of the boundaries. We took a look at SPC's mesoanalyis and wondered how about 50 chasers could be parked, waiting for initiation with weak due west 850's. Hell if I see SW 850's which are notorious boundary layer moisture killers. I know chances of seeing a tornado are slim if not blue, clear skies.

On the other hand, GFS is now breaking down the ridge and in general agreement with the ECMWF of bringing a powerful disturbance towards the middle of next week and will probably last through the weekend.

I noticed some hits from an Australian storm forum for the live video streams, so I added more on the right that I could find.

In chaser news, storm chaser Brian Barnes was arrested for I guess not leaving an area he was safely reporting to the NWS of. Story made drudge and other news outlets. And Roger Edwards takes his usual indirect cheap shot at someone....this time at Shane Adams for falsely reporting a tornado that I guess wasn't, and accused him of whatever. It would be quite the shocker to see Roger's balls finally drop, man-up and just name that person instead of pussy-footing around leaving others to guess or assume.

Jim Reed intercepted an amazing landspout out near where I used to live outside of Leoti, KS (I think). The video showed him on GMA running towards it, because it was nearly stationary and he wanted to get an amazing up close photo. Of course if that were Reed and Joel or anyone else some don't approve of, they'd get labeled a yahoo. It makes no difference to me, as I'll ride my bike into a tornado dressed up as a clown if I was in the mood for it. I used to see these pompous, narcissistic bastard's points in how it would potentially make the chase 'community' look bad. Then I realized that was just a smoke screen for envy, and that's what made the chaser community look bad, was this seniority select few of "veteran" chaser's hierarchy of horse shit. Embarrassing really... childish, pointless, dumb. People will see a certain group of people the way they've always viewed them as, not much will change that. It's like the Godfather-mafia drama, only without the violence, the threats without acting out upon, and an overrated cast from Revenge of the Nerds. I could have written that out like an insecure, two-faced author would have, but I'd risk my integrity of those who respect the person I'm not. In case you haven't figured it out yet, I just don't give a shit about the toes I step on.

May 10th, 2008 Chase Account

I mentioned on Friday night to Eric B'Hymer that SE Kansas was my target and I thought the models were not not forecasting enough instability near and just to southeast of the surface low, with lots of PVA from the vort max just behind it and also better directional shear (didn't end up being that way for directional shear). I laughed when I woke up at around 9 a.m. and saw but a slight risk for hail for much of the target area. I called Darin to see if he wanted to go, he called me back and thought the same thing. By the time I got to Lawrence a tornado watch was just issued (wtf?) and we headed south to pick up Eric in Iola.

Mike Parker, Eric, Darin and I chit-chatted for a bit...Mike opting out for a family barbecue he couldn't get out of. We headed east to Yates Center, filled up, then went south as storms started to fire in Sumner county, KS in good instability but in due west surface winds! We weren't about to attack these storms in due west surface winds and waited for them to hit the better shear/air where we were at. We parked in the EXACT same spot we did on May 1st, south of Neodesha, watching probably one of the most spectacular updrafts I have ever seen...rock solid, towering just to our west in Elk county. Still in the shit air, we headed east on US 400 and I think were on the 59/400 junction where we filmed a lowering here:



Not tornado-warned yet, and we see nothing but rising motion in the scud, and we floor it east to stay up and ahead of the storm. The NWS calls Darin (not really sure which office) and asks us what we see, and the storm looks very HP and Darin says it's looking kind of outflow-ish. Ben Prusia passes us going the other way (we see Ben everywhere now!) and I almost thought he was ditching this storm for the one coming in from the SW...

We head into Oswego and are getting hit with a lot of rain, and we notice a HUGE RFD cut to our north and quickly get east of town where a cone funnel is now visible in the rain. We're all looking back as Doug, Jordan, and Mike are following us as well, and note scud being pulled in hard and a small debris cloud visible just to our NW. Darin hands me the camera as I look for a road to pull off of, and film just as it lifts back up, and within the next 5 minutes, completely occludes to the south which I thought was very strange.

In the meantime, no more than 20 miles to our south, there is a violent wedge on the ground, in which this supercell develops out of nowhere, and engulfs our storm. I have no doubt our supercell was minutes away from doing the same thing by the way it looked, if it hadn't have been for this one.

So now we are playing the "punch the core from hell" game from the north while this supercell to our south is doing 50 mp to the E/ESE...here's a GR3 capture. Thanks to Dean Baron on Stormtrack for it:

We are the green icon with the arrow pointed down just east of Columbus:



Long story short, we hydroplane at least 3 times, encounter golfball-size hail and see lots of baseballs along the interstate, and finally go south on US 71 where we encounter probably EF-1 damage north of Neosho with major powerlines down. Just to the east of it, we see probably one of the most amazing rotating wall clouds and possible tornadic circulation underneath it (as this meso is still causing damage but from our vantage point we can't see the ground). We debate for about 5 minutes whether the lines were hot or not and we let someone else drive over them before we did. We head east on some county road where we see more damage and people outside. We yell and ask if they need help and they say they're okay, so we continue navigating through the damage path noting huge trees uprooted and some houses with minor damage.

More later...I'm running out of time with 2 finals today. My target for tomorrow is Cherokee county, KS again in extreme SE KS.

Greensburg Anniversary Video

Thanks to Reed Timmer for uploading these for me. Darin, my girlfriend Devin (hi Devin!) and I watched Brian Schodorf's documentary on PBS last night, which was pretty good. More later, I'm still up at 2 a.m. finishing some maps for GIS on tornado tracks in Johnson County, KS...cool stuff.

May 4th is a special day for me. It marked my first ever storm chase (2003) which Derek and I saw a deadly F-4 rip through north K.C. That's the day that got me hooked. We had no clue what we were doing back then.

Here is nearly 40 minutes of our Greensburg video from start till finish of Friday, May 4th 2007. A day I probably talk about too much and think about too much, but a day that changed me forever. God Bless the residents and those who truly care and are helping them out.


Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:



Part 4:

Pics from yesterday

Too lazy to post a chase report, but these are near Fredonia and Lafontaine, KS. Storms were elongated, linear-looking after first initiation...we blew off the NE OK storms and hung out and talked to about 10 different locals who stopped to chat. Big circus in Neodesha, KS with the TIV and DOW's with the whole town seeing the show. Ran into Randy Hicks there at the gas station as well...and Chris Rice, Steve Polley, Tyler Constantini, Jay Cazel and others. Ben Prusia also stopped to chat near Lafontaine as I laid in a corn field snapping photos lol. It was amusing to watch people haul ass after a shitty supercell we ditched, and then 5 minutes later turn back around and head the opposite way. Maybe one day I'll see a tornado again, it's coming up close to a year...good thing I'm not big on those, or I'd be depressed!

More tomorrow.....(the ones I didn't blow out or have 800 ISO on!)