It is spring and it is time to go storm chasing on the Great Plains!\u00a0 I will be the tour director for 6 of 7 tours for Tempest Tours this May and June and into very early July.\u00a0\u00a0 The first tour begins tomorrow (as I write this), Wednesday, April 29.\u00a0 It looks like the weather pattern will be in our favor for several days at least at the beginning of the tour, and tomorrow we’ll be headed towards West Texas.<\/p>\n
My friend Kirstie joined me on the drive from L.A. to Texas beginning Friday, April 24th.\u00a0 The severe weather outlook for the weekend looked good around the Texas Panhandle, so we drove all afternoon and most of the night through the desert and through Arizona on I-40.\u00a0 We stopped before sunset at Amboy, CA, where a rock band was playing for about 5 people in front of Roy’s cafe! We tried to sleep in the car for a few hours at the AZ\/NM border.\u00a0 It was cold and noisy, as stupid trains came by every 15 minutes and blasted their horns at the nearby road crossing.<\/p>\n
So, what happened on the weekend chases?\u00a0 And where are the photos?\u00a0 I am shooting with a new Canon full-frame digital camera, and I haven’t loaded the software yet to be able to open the images!\u00a0 My version of Photoshop can’t handle these.\u00a0 So, sorry — no pics until I get around to that.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, April 25, we chased a cell from Groom, TX, to Reydon, OK, but it was high-based and unimpressive.\u00a0 We abandoned that for a good-looking cell to the south, near Cordell, OK.\u00a0 It had a good spaceship lookat dusk and was very pretty, but high-based too, with little tornado potential.\u00a0 I shot a ton of stills and missed the few really nice CGs with the storm.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, April 26, we teamed up with Martin Lisius and chased mostly cruddy storm cells in southwest Oklahoma.\u00a0 One supercell southwest of Elmer looked good for about 20 minutes, with a rotating wall cloud beneath an updraft with good organization.\u00a0 It fell apart as it neared Altus and did not produce a tornado.\u00a0 This was a “high risk” day and the Weather Service was really talking up the potential for many big tornadoes, but it was an almost complete bust.\u00a0 There was one nice tornado in Oklahoma, near Roll.\u00a0 It was a bummer to miss that tornado and that the day wound up a dud for the most part.<\/p>\n
Talk to you soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"