Sioux Falls

After Hays we ventured once again to the Dakotas for our last official chase of the season.  We spent a few days in Sioux Falls, SD which is a quaint little town in Southeastern SD.  We had one really good chase day where we woke up to a 15% tornado contour by the Storm Prediction Center and a moderate risk.  We really thought that Father's Day would be the day we would finally get to deploy our pods.  But alas, we were left with some beautifully structured supercells and possibly a brief touchdown or two.  Actually...it was a little more exciting than that in Scout 1.  We yet again drove into the circulation of a tornado genesis.  We were a bit ahead of the pack and ended up right under the lowering wall cloud.  Visibility went to zero in a split second and our truck was pushed into the next lane by a huge wind gust.  Our data from the anemometer showed about a 90mph peak wind.  We thought at first it was maybe just a gust front or downdraft because these storms were getting undercut by outflow and gusted out pretty quickly; but sure enough radar data showed a tornado had touched down right by us.  The next town over received some minor damage.

The next day was a down day so we headed to the zoo!  The Great Plains Zoo is a neat little attraction I would recommend to anyone passing through this area.   They had a lot of really cool animals and so many of them had babies!  Later that night we caught a laser light show at the Sioux Falls Park.  If you have ever seen the laser light show they have at Stone Mountain, GA, it was a bit like that but it told the story of how that area of South Dakota came to be.  It was very informative but the falls are absolutely stunning.  Not so huge, but the red quartz is really spectacular.

Today we called end of mission for CSWR!  But I am not done just yet!  Marcus and I are giving it one last stand out here near the SD/ND/MN borders so, fingers crossed, more to come!

Hays Has It! (chasing that is...)

I've been awful about updating this thing the past few days so here goes a reader's digest version of my time since visiting Russell.  We spent another couple of days in Hays, KS which turned out to be a blast.  It's a neat little town with surprisingly a lot to keep you busy for a short while.  After going back to Russell, we grabbed a few hours of shut eye at the hotel and then went out for a "backyard" chase.  There were some storms moving through the area (not tornadic) with some spectacular cloud features.  The ground was also very dry so the gust fronts off these storms really picked up the dust so well.  We were trying to take pictures and getting absolutely sandblasted.  The dust was getting picked up so high that it off in the distance you could only see a very thin sliver of sky between the cloud bases and the top of the dust plumes.  It was like something out of a horror movie!  It was a really great chase with an amazing lightning show at the end.  I'm a little partial to lightning...maybe it's being from Florida.  But I could have stood out there for hours watching the bolts dance across the clouds!

The next day in Hays was a first for me...fossil hunting with Marcus and Herb.  Millions of years ago (billions?) that area was covered in water and so in the limestone facades along the highways you can find fossils of shells and apparently prehistoric animals.  We found some really great ones but my suitcase might be a little heavy on the way home...

***I have more pics to add to this post.

Return to Russell

Yesterday I finally got the chance to do something that had been weighing heavily on my heart for weeks.  I was able to return to Russell, KS and speak with some of the neighbors of the woman whose house was destroyed by an EF-2 tornado on May 25th.  It was so important for me to be able to go back and stand where I stood that night; take it all in with a blue sky and bright sun overhead.  Obviously most of the debris had been cleaned up by then but it was still evident what had gone on in this small neighborhood just outside of Russell.

I picked through some of the debris for a little while and then ventured across the street to the neighbor's house which still had tarps on the roof.  No one answered when I rang the doorbell, but as I was walking away a truck pulled into the driveway with a man and two small boys.  The boys had these little buzzcut blonde mohawks and chocolate all over their faces.  I asked the man if his wife was home and he said she owned a little store down on Main Street and would be at work the rest of the day.  I then told him who I was and that I was there that night.  He seemed a little hesitant to talk to me, but I think he could tell it meant a lot to me because he started to open up a little more.  He told me that a lot of the homes that had damage were still waiting to be repaired and probably wouldn't have work done on them until after harvest season.  He also told me that they brought Pat to the hospital in Hays (much larger than the little medical center in Russell) a few days after the tornado where the doctors found much more extensive injuries than they originally had known about.  She has a broken chest plate, clavicle and neck among other injuries.  But he said she was back in the Russell hospital and was starting to get around her room with a walker.  We talked a little bit longer and I told him how scared I was that night and that I think of their family often.  He asked his little boys if they were scared that night and the older one told me it woke him up while the younger little guy, maybe 4 or 5, told me it sounded like a train was in the chimney.

After talking with the family, we walked around a little bit longer and spoke with another man who had over $80,000 worth of damage on his property.  He told me they had no warning whatsoever because the power had been knocked out earlier in the evening and the sirens in town had no battery backup system.  He was so sincere when he thanked us for what we do with our research because he wished they had more time before the tornado.  On the way out of town, I left the flashlight I had borrowed from the family across the street on the front porch.

It may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people.  But for me, this night was life-changing.  My heart breaks when I see people upset or hurting.  I remember my first trip to NYC at age 14 where I cried myself to sleep in the hotel room because of all the homeless people huddled in cardboard on the street.  It is such a dichotomy.  I love storms and tornadoes (maybe more than anything else in the world) but to see how they ruin and change lives in a heartbeat almost makes you feel a little guilty.  Sure this wasn't a large, multiple vortex, long track tornado that wiped an entire town off the map killing tens of people in his wake.  But an event like this one doesn't have to be on that type of scale to move and affect you.  I think we could all use a little more compassion and vulnerability.  People always say not to sweat the small stuff; but maybe we shouldn't reach for that anti-perspirant just yet.  We can be so quick to shrug our shoulders and turn a blind eye sometimes when we really should be reaching out a hand and counting our own blessings.  Please continue to keep this little community, and all others impacted by tornadoes and severe weather, in your prayers and thoughts!

Pictures I took that night:

Almost three weeks later:

The Prairie Sky is Wide & High

Deep in the heart of Texas!  Another Lone Star state chase and this time, we may have actually gotten something.  And by something, no I don't mean data or an intercept with pods, but an actual storm with winds, hail, clouds, lightning, funnels...the works.  It's been way too long since we've had any exciting weather so needless to say even the wimpy little storms we had yesterday were pretty amazing.  Two days ago we took a ferry day and traveled to Dodge City, KS which unfortunately was under SE winds during our entire stay causing a wonderfully repugnant odor of feedlot and slaughterhouse to settle into the motel rooms.  But we traded the putrid stench for the enticing taste of a cute little coffee shop the next morning...yes, REAL coffee...not hotel mud water.  That was a definite highlight of the last few days.  Not so exciting I know but when you drive all day, get very little sleep, and drink hot, brown water for "coffee" in the mornings; well, you get the idea.

But enough about coffee; I'm here to talk weather.  So yesterday we traveled down to the also delightfully stinky town of Hereford, TX where we were cautiously optimistic about any sort of super cell development.  But a little patience payed off and we soon had about four discrete cells threatening to merge into an MCS which we quickly closed the gap on near Morton, TX.  We stayed on the storms for about an hour but nothing looked promising on radar in terms of rotation so Josh and the CSWR team decided to call end of mission and head up to our hotel in Amarillo.  Tim Marshall and his driver Tim2 decided to stay on the cell a little longer because while the DOW wasn't showing much, GR3 was consistently showing a tight couplet.  Marcus asked Josh if Scout 1 could stay on the storm as well for awhile because there was some incredible lightning (the kind that streaks across the entire sky...which in Texas is HUGE).

So we were given permission to "go rogue" as long as we avoided core punching.  It was my second real test having to navigate and keep an eye on the radar simultaneously (Carlsbad, NM lightning adventure was the first) so I felt totally in my element.  And it paid off.  About twenty minutes after the team pulled away, our storm went tornado warned.  We saw multiple funnels and according to the Tims, there may have even been a brief touchdown of the rain wrapped circulation. We also got caught by some wild outflow, over 50mph!

On the way back to Amarillo, we got pretty lucky again.  Off in the distance to the NW, we could make out the Dora, NM tornado warned supercell.  In the intermittent lightning streaks we could make out this large cone funnel.  Overall, it was by far one of the best chases of the season.

Today we are evaluating a dryline setup with pretty weak upper level flow.  The options are to either chase or split the team off and send half to Boulder/half to either North Platte, NE or Hays, KS.  It looks like they may extend the season by a few days as well for the first big trough of the season (finally) early next week.  So glad I haven't booked a flight home yet...

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.