One Eye On The Sky

We went down to Texas our last day and I’m now on my way home from there. There will be about 2 hrs sleep before I go to the airport and then back to Stockholm.

We ended Day 13 at a typical gimmic Texas theme restaurant – The Great Texan. They had bull cojones and rattlesnake on the menu. The rattlesnake, was unfortunately not in season and the bull balls tasted … not good. Instead I ate a bloody piece of 18 oz  M E A T . On a stage one could challenge the restaurant in an attempt to fininsh a 72 ounce piece of meat including baked potatoes, salads and snacks in one hour. If you can make it you get the food for free. Two attempted, one was successful but it sure looked painful. Only in America.

The last day was actually the opposite of most other days, and actually resembled the first day the most. No real storm clouds, a long-elusive search of a cloud but, in fact, a tornado!

Not everything is bigger in Texas, at least when it comes to tornadoes. Today’s tornado crept down from the cloud, sniffing gently at the ground and retreated to the safety of the wall cloud again – all in about 8 seconds flat. I had just enough time to put down the binoculars and take a picture of it in horizon. In addition to this we managed to see some spectacular lightning, including five parallel flashes simultaneously!

This was the end of my trip and I really would love to go back for the next season as well. It is, however, a bit expensive. I will see how things turn out but I really would like to! This trip was one of the most amazing things I have done in my life and I have been travelling everywhere from the Amazon jungle to Sydney.

The funny thing is that I have never before had a real interest for weather, and in a way I still don’t. I am just so completely amazed in how spectacular severe weather is!

Texan Stake House

Detail Study of my food at the  Texan Stake House. Excised muscles with third degree burns from a smelly animals – mmm …. Tasty!

Carnivores – this guy had 72 oz of meat, together with a baked potato and salad…in 30 minutes!

The chicken Tornado that just dared to be on the ground in a few seconds

Sitting in the car now on the way from Colorado to Texas to position for the very last Storm Chasing Day. Texas is supposed to be quite promising for tomorrow, and Texas feels good – everything is a bit bigger in Texas – and it was here we saw our first super-cell. I heard this morning  that some other storm chasers (again) had seen a tornado just minutes away from where we experienced our 80 mph winds the other day. So it was not completely in vain when I peered out the window, waiting for a tornado to appear.

This was the second time in a short time we ended up very close to a tornado without knowing it. Apparently, we had fallen between the outflow and inflow – if you look at the pictures from Day 12 you will see what that means. Rain which basically comes in from the side and powerful winds.

I have probably gained a few pounds during these two weeks – we eat very poorly and basically do not move at all. I can hardly recall what vegetables look like!

Day 12 turned out to be a classic Storm Chase-day. We went to Colorado in the morning and drove toward a promising storm, but the roads were not in the same direction as the storm went so we got behind and inside the storm again, which meant rain and poor visibility.

Fortunately, the storms pops up earlier in Colorado than the rest of the Midwest so even though we wasted 2 hrs on this storm in vain the clos was still at only around 4 p.m. when we made our second attempt. We then ended up in front of a perfect scenery with two super-cells next to each other – we stood and looked back and forth and did not really know which one to keep an eye on. All that was missing was a tornado and the Pulitzer Prize 2009 would be mine! Supposedly it was very close since virtually all the data indicated that a tornado could be formed at any second but the storm rotated a bit too slow.

We continued on and I guess you know the story now. Repositioning, wall cloud, core punch. Today’s big event was that we got into our first great hailstorm and we followed it for nearly 40 minutes. The hail was not as large as before (dime sized hail) but it was cool to see how it completely tore the trees to pieces and was drumming so hard on the car making it completely impossible to talk.

The two super-cells merged some time later and we were hoping for The Perfect Storm, but even if the storm was unbelievably fotogenique, it never went berserk unfortunately.

Textbook example of a storm cell – the rain on the right is the outflow and the low cloud on the left is the inflow. You can see how the rain is sort of sucked into the inflow, almost even before hitting the ground.

Last photo a bit more zoomed in

Rain is beautiful – if you look at it from a distance.

Two clouds, which we hope will begin to rotate. One is white and the other dark gray, depending on how the sun shines at them

Otero County

White Scud

Boobie clouds – but not Mammatus

One of my favorite pictures from the trip – this was the northern part of the double-super cell we looked at

This was the southern part of the same super cell – I would have liked to see this from a bit further away!

You can clearly see how the super-cell is divided into layers

Layers of clouds

One part of the cloud with an anti-cyclone rotation – that is, against the direction the rest of the cloud was rotating

I like this portrait

Then it began to hail immensely – you can see how the leaves from the trees are torn apart

The hail came down like artillery fire on the fields

Foooooooore! I went out to see how it felt but it was not so bad with a thick sweater.

A road in Colorado in June

The sun started to set and the clouds looked like a catamaran boat – a lovely sight

Two details that one sees a bit now and then. A beaver tail-cloud and a vortex (a mini tornado in the clouds), you can see the latter above the beaver tail cloud, a bit to the right of the pink cloud.

I was talking about broken expectations yesterday. I do not know what the opposite should be called, but it was certainly what happened today.

In the morning two girls dropped out of Tour. They have had a bit different expectations about Storm Chasing (more party, less waiting, more shopping, less driving). They were quite nice girls but the extra room in the vans were appreciated as well!

Today was a Travel Day again, that is, when you only get from one place to another in order to position yourself for tomorrow. The relatively negative mood, which lasted a few days were blown away again. The tour is coming to an end and we have been quite lucky to see so much. We just hope for one more tornado or something new!

Somewhere during my third nap of the day, we stopped at a village that promotes itself for having the world’s largest hand dug well. Surely it was a bit impressive but not as impressive as the fact that the village was virtually wiped out May 4, 2007 by, you guessed it, a tornado.

The tornado that swept through the city was about 2 km in diameter! They had a small museum (200 square feet), which was for the well, but which served as a temporary museum for the tornado also. We saw photos of the enormous devastation the tornado had made. In a tree, I found a piece of metal still sat wrapped around a branch …

A little bit later we stopped at a gas station where a seemingly harmless storm piled up a few miles ahead. Since we had nothing better to do we went toward it. It showed no “good” signs, and wasn’t even on Storm watch.

A sure sign that absurdly often prove to be a good sign is when we happen to have killed a bird with the windshield on the way in to a storm. This happened in Wyoming, tornado and also happened now. Apparently, the combination killed bird / tornado is very common for Cloud 9 for some reason.

We saw, however, no tornado today but what we experienced was just as cool.

Entering the storm we thought we saw a funnel, but it is so often wishful thinking and easy to confuse with Scud that one rarely reflects very much about it. Photo Evidence later showed, however, that it actually had been a funnel (a “tornado” that does not reach the ground). A little further into the storm all came at once, it got a Storm Warning and then got the status Tornado Warned. A bit later, we received information that a tornado had been reported from the storm. Of this, we saw very little since we once again ended up in the middle of the rain and had a hard time getting out of it.

Early on, we had taken the decision to make a core punch for fun because the chance that the storm could produce a tornado was minimal. Otherwise it would have been a better idea to stay outside in order to better see it. We realized, with hindsight, that it was probably the wrong decision to make a core punch. We officially gave up and started to ride out the storm again. What occured then made this whole day.

The visibility decreased rapidly while the wind and the rain intensified. In the end, the visibility so poor that one could not even see 15 feet ahead. The visibility on the sides were slightly better – maybe 20-30 feet. The wind continued to pick up and eventually it was ridiculously strong winds. Our guides who have been doing storm chasing and hurricane chasing hurricane in about 20 years estimated gusts of wind to 80 mph!

E i g h t y  mph ! !

This corresponds to the power of being in the middle of an F1 tornado or a Category 1 hurricane. The difference, I believe, between being at 80 mph in a tornado and being in the same speed without a tornado is that in a tornado the winds are more concentrated in a certain point. If I understood my guide Charles correctly, we were in a “mesocyclone”, i.e. an undefined rotating air mass during a storm. An air mass that at any time can produce a tornado as well, even directly above oneself! We were quite happy that there were no hail for in that case our wind shileds would have been smashed to pieces. I mean imagine the hail you seen in my photos earlier. In 80 mph. From the side.

The most exciting thing about this was that you knew you were in the middle of the danger zone, in a storm with tornado warnings. This, with a view of 60 feet. I looked out the window and was just waiting for the rounded shape of a tornado to break off at the visibility line. The scary thing was maybe that I was actually hoping for it! Sometimes the logic is not quite there! If it would have been ok’d by the tour guides, I would have  jumped out of the van to feel the wind in my body. Probably not the best idea either…

This was probably the most thrilling on the whole trip, including the tornado, and it came as a pure bonus. It felt a bit like a revenge for the previous day in which we expected everything and did not get anything special. Today, I expecting nothing and was caught in the middle of a raging storm.

Basketball in Greensburg, which was hit by an F5 tornado two years ago

A piece of metal wrapped around an tree by the Greensburg tornado

A destroyed tree and a hous only consisting of a basement – Greensburg.

Today was the most promising day of the year according to the forecast. I tried not to get my expectations up too much but it was of course difficult. Especially, when the day begins with that already at 11:30 a.m. the first storm comes in over us when we are driving. A flash bangs down about 100 meters next to us and we can not separate the flash from the bang.

Then we end up waiting again as usual. After a while we begin to follow a cloud that does not seem directly exciting though. Having positioned ourselves nearby a couple of oil tanks alongside us, we see the storm come in and it is after all quite powerful, at least very powerful winds.

We continue on and end up in the rain again, this time without the hail. Basically we drive around in the rain for over an hour and it’s pretty boring. Finally we stop at a gas station – and hear about the most interesting thing of the whole day. A couple of storm chasers who had stood some distance from us by the oil tanks have seen a tornado during a very short time – a matter of seconds – touched down on the other side of the oil tanks when we were standing there!

There was never any real danger, I guess, but a bit sad that we were placed so that we did not see it.

An all in all pretty boring and a bit frustrating day. We have high expectations and also raised the bar a bit – all storms must of course, at least in some respect, be better than the last! What can be said about today’s storm was at least that was the windiest (probably around 50 mph, where we stood) and the greenest (plenty of hail in the clouds).

Well, I just hope some of the last days will have something exciting to come up with. I am starting to look forward to go home now – I especially look forward to normal food. Today I was incredibly hungry at 7 p.m. when we stopped at the gas station. The most healthy I could choose was …peanuts.

Update at 9.50 p.m. – The last we saw of this storm was after dinner when it suddenly showed some cool moves. A stunning display of lightning fireworks. The lightning were mostly hidden behind a large cloud and each flash lit up the clouds as if it were a bomb, and there were about 3 flashes per second. Very pretty!

This was the forecast for today

Here is where the tornado touched down a few hundred meters away from us.

Approximately a 100 feet view in the rain

The clouds hovering so low that one can not even see the bottom of them behind the trees

Very green sky

It does not matter how often I see this. It is still so powerful to see a wall cloud hovering in, taking over the city, accompanied with that weird green color

The large low pressure that caused the storms we have been observing lately has come to pass, and our choice was either to continue eastward to Illinois, or wait a day and go back to Kansas on Tuesday. We chose the latter and took a  so called “Down day”. During Down days, you often go to a museum,  visit some weird tourist attraction or something else. We took the opportunity to wash, shop and go back to Kansas.

Can hail really be exciting? The answer is Yes!

This promising Sunday started out slow and it was not until the around 4 in the afternoon when we actually landed at our first prospect. A very beautiful cloud that seemed promising, but above all gave us a…sense of hail. Firstly, we heard a constant and fairly loud rumbling above us while we observed the storm. It was like thunder in the distance but consisted instead of hail inside the cloud that fell down, caught up and tumbling around on each other. How can small hail grains make a noise like this? We will get back to that at a later point.

This cloud fairly quickly turned uninteresting. Fortunately though, we had  just to turn 180 degrees around to find another storm cloud. It was just one of those days. We began to follow it but since we had positioned ourselves for the first cloud, we were completely wrong for the other. As a result, we had to make a so-called core punch, i.e. go straight through the storm to reach the right place.

This core punch was a long and tedious process of constant rain and at constant risk of hail. It was also pretty exciting to constantly be driving in the storm’s immediate trace. The rain, however, makes it very hard to discover a tornado, so we were quite keen to get us out of the core.

After chasing through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri, we finally reached the edge of the storm and passed it. By then it was sunset, which gave the whole cloud, a very eery looking color. Everyone hoped for a tornado right there and then for it would have become quite wonderful pictures…but we were to see no tornado today. The cloud had apparently produced a tornado later that night, but tornado hunting at night is quite another matter.

Today’s big adventure nevertheless was hail. First, the unspeakable hail rumble in the afternoon, secondly when we were once again gunned with golf ball sized hail on the way from there. The worst, however, was when we drove past the small village of Oregon, Missouri, arriving a few minutes after the storm had passed. Their tornado siren was running which created an even more dramatic dimension to what we saw on the ground. Hail the size of oranges! Oranges!

One realizes then that we were standing under a cloud in which tens of thousands of orange-sized spiny ice balls defy gravity only because of upward flowing air, tumbling upside down and constantly getting bigger and bigger …

Can you imagine the people who live there? You hear on the radion in the morning that there are tornado warnings in your county and that you should keep your eyes open. You continue to hear reports as the storm seems to be heading straight at your village. At 5.43 p.m. a tornado siren is started and the sound drowns everything in the village. You go down into the basement with your family and just wait for a possible tornado to rip your house apart. First, the wind start to rorad, an artillery of hail roars against the ceiling, walls and windows.

When the storm have passed you go out into your garden or farm and realize that you are standing in Mother Nature’s driving range. You also realize that you are very happy not to have been caught outdoors. The punishment for being outdoors during a storm is stoning with ice rocks!

Move to the Midwest anyone?

Wheat is beautiful. One just want to lie down and sleep on this bed of wheat.

A perfect storm structure as it looks on radar. An important little detail is the little hook on the bottom of the cloud, saying that the cloud rotates – a lot.

An almost perfect storm structure, that unfortunately did not turn out to be very interesting.

A ridiculously long train of storm chasers, scientists, etc. following the cloud. We are, however, first in line! This season has not been a particularly good storm season and the creations of specific storm zones tend to attract everyone!

Our long drive in core punch was during massive rain at times. Here a few cars are waiting for the storm to pass, under a bridge. A very bad protection for possible tornadoes, since you are at risk being crushed under the bridge.

One of the larger hail we found. . It had already started to melt away and was probably a bit more spiny before.

Most of the hail was not orange sized – this was more the normal size.

Hail core – seeing this one can understand a little better how the hail is created. Freezing rain lands on small hail grains and builds layer upon layer and gets bigger and bigger.

Imagine hearing a tornado siren, you look out and up at the sky and it looks like this.

The closest we got to a tornado this day. It was not even a funnel, just a bit low altitude clouds – Scud.

The relatively difficult storm hunting in Missouri (traffic, many hills, many trees, bad roads) ends with a wonderful sunset which is also lit up by a nearby field full of fireflies.

Sitting in the car in an extremely humid and hot Kansas, not far from Manhattan, where I studied at K-State 03-04.It is a fairly typical “before” scenario.Everyone walks around a bit restless, moving back and forth into the gas station and buying more and more junk food (I have eaten such bad food the last week it is almost ridiculous!). Once in a while people come up talking to us, being a bit curious about what we do and sometimes also a bit troubled. What we consider our great joy is typically their nightmare – a fact which is easy to forget sometimes.

The conditions for today looks really, really good so if you’re reading this after 22:30 it might be fun to watch our webcam.. Right now we just sit and sweat … and waiting.

The amazing day yesterday ended in a really nice hotel, simply because we could not find anything else. Not a problem to me, since lodging is included in this trip!

This weekend is expected to be really good and it appearantly started of really well. Saturday, however, was a “bust day. This means, you go out to an area that has the right conditions, but nothing never really happens. We stopped at a cornfield in Iowa and it was extremely hot and humid, but absolutely nothing happened. The highlight was when we went into the little town nearby (Sidney, Iowa) and bought a Fat Tire ( Colorado beer), sat down by the water tank and just chilled out.

Another interesting thing is to look at the group dynamics among us. How groups are formed, and how different people react to the boredom which quite often is apperant (5-6 hours in the car per day!). I guess how you treat the boredom depends alot on how well you are prepared for it, mentally and with stuff like books etc.

Sidney – One of many village names having a counterpart in the world.

George hosts a TV serie called Angry planet where he is documenting everything from tornadoes to avalanches and volcanoes. He works occasionally on Cloud9Tours.

We drove on to the cloud that had created the tornado earlier in the afternoon. It still had a strong rotation which created a super cell with a beautiful round shape with different layers. We went in under it to look for more tornadoes but the supply had run out.

Instead, we once again experienced the tremendous feeling of being under a super cell with a wall cloud underneath eating its way over the fields. The sun was about to set, which painted the sky in dozens of lovely colors. When the sun went down the dying storm played out a lightning spectacle I have not seen the likes of before. When you have seen what nature can do during the day and then hear the storm clouds rumble and flash, then it is easy to feel very, very small.

We called it a  day around 22 o’clock and began to move against the hotel and something to eat, having the twin super cells next to us. They moved diagonally along our route, towards the highway we drove on and flashed between each other, and lit up the whole sky. It was probably 2-3 flashes per second! This accompanied with the radio in the dark announcing: “We have a tornado warning. Go down to your basements. Go down to your basements. This is a very dangerous storm. This is a very dangerous storm. etc. etc.”.

The day ended at a restaurant that, a few minutes before, had lain in the way of super-cells but survived. We ate dinner with the whole group of researchers,  TV people, etc.

What a bloody day!!

Supercell with clear round stock. I know, let’s go under it!

A little closer, the wall cloud underneath is clear and large.

Here we are just at the edge of the cloud. The wall cloud (dark gray) are eating itself onwards as something from a disaster movie.

The cloud is so well defined that you see a completely straight shadow of it.

Looking the other way you can see the second super-cell that is as finely rounded and very, very well defined. The wall cloud underneath is barely visible.

The sun begins to go down and creates long shadows of the mammatus clouds.

A magnificent sight

I took about 50 pictures here. This was the only flash I caught At this point it flashed only every 10 seconds so it was a bit difficult.

We came back to a local restaurant and watched the weather news. The feeling was very much like when you have been to a football game with your favorite team and see them win. Then you come home, watching the sports news to see the goals and everything else from all other angles, and discuss each others’ perceptions of today’s event.

Huge hail balls. They used them as ice for drinks

Also check out the Weather Channels very nice video report from the tornado.