Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
Here are the last 5 days of our storm chasing trip from early June. I apologize profusely for not getting these out in a timely fashion! Day 6 (Saturday 6/2/2018) With no storms in the vicinity for the next two days, we decided to take it easy and hang out in Grand Island. As we […]
NOTE: I never got around to finishing this on time, but here it is. This post refers to our storm chasing day on Friday 6/1/2018 It was really nice to have an off day on Thursday, because Friday ended up being an exhausting day. A vigorous shortwave trough centered over the northern Plains drew warm, […]
Our 4th day of storm chasing (5/31/2018) was a much-needed off day. After driving all the way from Albuquerque to the Texas Panhandle to catch some supercells on Memorial Day and seeing fantastic mesocyclones and gust fronts on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, a break was in order. But unfortunately, this day was still fairly exhausting […]
We knew that the majestic, rotating supercell we saw yesterday (Tuesday 5/29/2018) would be very hard to surpass, but Wednesday ended up far exceeding our expectations. Even as early as the night before, the Storm Prediction Center only had “marginal risk” for severe weather over the Western Oklahoma/NW Texas region. But in the morning, the […]
Monday’s solar eclipse was the most breathtaking natural event I’ve ever witnessed in my life. The transition from light to dark was frighteningly fast, and I was dumbfounded by the beauty and extent of the sun’s corona at totality. I was so taken aback by the experience and everything happened so fast that my memory is […]
Our last (sniff sniff) day of storm chasing was significantly more relaxed than Thursday’s, but we still managed to see some well-defined mammatus and asperatus clouds, a giant wall cloud, some very strong straight-line winds, and the most amazing lightning storm I’ve ever seen in my life. Because Friday’s storms were much further south than […]
Even though it was nowhere near as active as forecast, day 6 was by far our most active day yet. We saw it all: a tornado, tons of wall clouds, an amazing shelf cloud, multiple funnel clouds, and we were pummeled by high winds, torrential rain, and hail on two separate occasions. The SPC homepage […]
With tornado activity well to our north yesterday, we decided to take a day off from chasing and explore Oklahoma! After sleeping in past noon, we decided to head east from Clinton, OK towards Oklahoma City and get some good southern barbecue. We stopped at Swadley’s Bar-B-Q on the western outskirts of Oklahoma City and […]
Our second day of storm chasing was definitely a lot more active than our first! We saw flooding rains, strong winds, lots of (presumably wind, possibly tornado) damage, a weak funnel cloud, several weakly rotating wall clouds, lots of “scud,” and even smoke from an oil tank that got struck by lightning. The storms started […]
After much anticipation, Joey and I finally saw some good storms on our third day of our storm chasing vacation! No tornadoes were in the cards for today, but we saw brief bursts of heavy rain, small hail, gusty winds, an impressive flanking line, and above all, very frequent lightning! We started out the day […]
