We Need a Tornado

It's been a quiet couple of days here on the CSWR team.  We're all getting a little worried about how quickly the close of the season is coming up on us.  Knowing that we might not get a chance to deploy our pods on a tornado is a tough pill to swallow but at least we've collected some pretty great radar data and, hey, we have mesonet data from TIV and Scout 1's intercept back on the 25th in Russell, Kansas.  So the season hasn't been a total bust research speaking.

Friday we raced up to Bowman, ND to only get skunked by the capping inversion.  We spent hours and hours waiting for storms to fire in a gas station parking lot but nothing came of it so we drove to this tiny little town called Lemmon in South Dakota.  This town's claim to fame is that it is home to the world's largest petrified wood forest...yet it is so tiny that it doesn't have a single fast food restaurant.  I wasn't aware that was even legal in the United States.  So dinner was a granola bar.  Oh the joys of chasing!

Saturday was spent chasing right up to the Canadian border...less than 8 miles away to be exact...in North Dakota and Minnesota.  We ended up in this tiny little near-ghost town called Clyde, ND.  It was so eerie.  The town has about 5 people living there now, two houses looked inhabited from what we could see.  The rest of the town literally looked like something out of a science fiction novel where everyone just up and abandoned their homes and buildings leaving them to disrepair.  The other creepy part of the town was the swarms and swarms of bugs.  We are talking bees, biting flies, mosquitoes, horse flies...  Marcus did some shooting with the 3D camera he is trying out for Panasonic of the whole fleet lined up in front of this ghost town.  He is hoping to use some of the footage from this trip for the Tornado Alley movie sequel.  In addition to being brutalized by these bugs, earlier in the day we pulled off this little country road so he could shoot the fleet driving by a her of cows.  He crawled under the fence to get his shot and as everyone was driving by, one of the bulls in the cow herd started coming right at him, nostrils flared.  The bull did this little gallop move and my heart dropped into my stomach because I thought our medic was about to get trampled by a cow.  But Marcus quickly rolled back under the fence and in the process lost his hat.  We thought for sure the cow would take his hat and run off but after a long stand off he backed off.  But back to North Dakota, we saw some gorgeous storms and an amazing red sunset (at nearly 10pm!)  but the storms were all high based and so once again, no tornadoes...

Today we drove through five states to get to our current way point of Auburn, NE (North and South Dakotas, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska).   We are really hoping these small little blips on radar get their act together and that we will have some storms to chase, but it's not looking so good once again.