From Zero to Four

FINALLY!  We saw tornadoes!  And four of them!  Possible five but lost visual briefly due to rain.  What an incredible day in the world of storm chasing.  I am completely exhausted but I just had to post because I didn't want to lose that post chase adrenaline rush.  Today wasn't perfect chasing but it was pretty incredible.  No real supercells but a definite line of shear that allowed for some brief, weak spin up tornadoes.  And hail!  Our brand new little Scout 1 has officially been initiated into the armada with some good old quarter size hail dents.  I still cannot stop thinking about how beautiful today was.  Nature is an incredibly volatile and spectacular thing.    We didn't get to deploy any pods of any of the tornadoes today but we did get some great mesonet data off the Scout vehicles, radar data from the DOWs, and pictures/videos of course!  We came within 3km of a tornado that did some pretty substantial damage to a farmstead and a wind turbine farm.  We watched it cross the road and saw a debris cloud at the base at one point.  And we came within feet of being struck by a LARGE piece of debris.  Being Scout 1, we were pretty much in the lead with the exception of the DOWs so we got to peel off real quickly from the group to go investigate the damage at the wind turbine farm.  We actually had to reroute once because of power lines down across the road, but we met one of the guys who installs the wind turbines.  We spoke with him for awhile and he explained that they were all fiberglass and out of the maybe 50 or so that we could see, the one the tornado struck was the newest one just installed last week.  Crazy!  He actually let Ronan drive right up to and I got to get pretty close to plot the GPS coordinates and take damage pictures.  Being that close, we were able to figure out that the piece of debris that almost struck our vehicle was a piece of the turbine!  It traveled about 1.5km away!  I'll definitely be adding more tomorrow but if I don't try to stop thinking about how amazing it all was, I will never get any sleep!  And tomorrow is looking like a chase day as well :)