In The Vortex

Category: General Weather

  • 2010 looking back at 2009

    2010 is of course well upon us now, and as usual with a new year, many of us look back at the events of the previous year, and forward to the year to come, and I am no different in that regard.  While I refuse to make New Year’s Resolutions, I do like to make a few goals, and see how I did on past year’s goals.

    In things related to storm chasing, the year would have been poor for me, with a mostly unactive season in the local area, and even long distance chases proved to be difficult for many storm chasers to capture that elusive tornado.  I say would have been poor for me except for the one exceptional intercept in Floyd County, Texas on April 29th, when we intercepted at close range, not one but TWO tornadoes.  That event made my whole chase year!  If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

    By the time June rolled around I had mostly written off storm chasing except for anything I needed to cover for KCBD.  I was burnt out and needed a break from weather.  So one day, on a day I wasn’t expecting to chase, a relatively decent supercell popped up just to my south and I got on it for the station.  Turned out to be a prolific hail producer and slow mover dropping copious amounts of hail for longer than an hour in the same location.  I thought that was pretty cool, but little did I know what was to come.

    Later that night as the storm was dying and I had called off the chase, the storm gave one last punch of lighting which struck a tank battery and ignited a fire on the south side of Lamesa, TX.  The subsequent explosion that I capture on tape of course has now been seen all over the world and kept me busy for quite a while dealing with media stuff surrounding it.  It also of course was the end of my chase vehicle, and I ended up with a new one.  If you haven’t seen that incredible video yet, here it is :

    **ADULT LANGUAGE ON VIDEO**

    For the rest of the year, I took a big break from the storm chasing/weather stuff, and did a ton of work around my property that had been on my to-do list, including building 100′ of fence, a new storage shed, tearing down an old garage, and building an addition to the house!  At the beginning of 2009 I said I would be happy to get one of those things done.  It was a major accomplishment to get them all done!

    I also like to take stock of my financial situation this time of year.  As some of you know, I have been working towards a debt free life.  I’m not quite where I could have been, only because I did do all that work, but it was productive nonetheless and improved life around here, so it’s ok with me.  Last year at this time I had planned to be completely debt free by now.  While I am much closer than I was, I didn’t make it, a big part is adding the new vehicle to replace the one damaged in the explosion.  However looking forward, I see no reason I shouldn’t be debt free by the end of 2010.  I can’t tell you how great it feels to get some of that paid off!

    I also start looking ahead toward storm chasing season.  To-do lists have been written and many things need to be done by March 1st, my “official” start date to storm chasing season.  Hard to believe only a month and a half away.  Looks like I’ll also be working with KCBD again this year.  This will be the 6th year chasing for them.  Wow has time flown!

    I’m also determined to get all the past chase accounts on the website.  This has been my yearly failed project for the last few years and I am determined to get that done! I am kicking myself for not keeping up with it, because as time passes, memory and details fade.  Any of you younger chasers reading this, this is some of the best advise I can give you: write logs for all your storm chases, promptly after the event!  One day you will be happy you did.

    The other major storm chasing related project is to get my entire video library over the years archived digitally.  I recently purchased two 1TB hard drives for this purpose.  This will be major and tedious work, but I need to get it done.  A by product of that is that I am going to be posting all the good stuff on my YouTube channel for you to watch!  Maybe even a DVD or two in the future!

    But first, I absolutely must get the Explosion DVD produced.  This has been put off too long and many people are waiting on it, so that is now top priority!

    Of course mother nature knows this and seems to be working up a huge trof in the western US which may bring some severe weather to Texas by the end of this week.  More on that later…

    How is your New Year starting out?

  • Snow Adds Exclamation Mark on 2009’s Quirky Weather

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    In what has become known to most as year that has had anything but typical weather, 2009 rounds out the year with nearly 2/3 of the U.S. covered in snow!

    We seem to be in between two major storm systems, but that didn’t stop a shortwave trough from returning brisk cold air and a snow for the 3rd time in a week to the Southern Plains.  While the northeast is feeling the last of a departing storm system and the northwest is starting to feel the effects of the next one, things on the whole are rather tranquil in what has largely been an uneventful year weatherwise in the U.S.

    From a storm chasing perspective, this was probably the worst year since 1988 for chasing tornadoes, it still provided a few events for those that were dedicated enough to stick it out and salvage something.  The highlight of the convective season was of course the tornado event in eastern Wyoming that was featured in the season finale of the Storm Chasers show on Discovery Channel.

    While that was a nice tornado over open land that lasted a while, it was rather unnewsworthy as far as tornadoes go, except for the fact that it was surrounded by more photographers, meteorologists, probes, instruments and live cameras that any other tornado in history.  It was even sampled directly by both Sean Casey’s Tornado Intercept Vehicle and Reed Timmer’s Dominator, both instrumented vehicles.   The amount of data that had to be gathered on that tornado and storm is unprecedented! This, in my opinion, makes this the single biggest storm chasing day of the year.

    There was also the Hurricane Season.  Rather the lack of a Hurricane Season.  While we had a few strong storms develop, they all stayed out to sea and the U.S. remained hurricane free this year except for a couple of minor tropical events.

    But as we rolled into the winter months now, El Nino, perhaps one of the strongest in history, is really getting things cranked up, and storm systems, as typical in El Nino years, are starting to slam through the southern U.S. with regular frequency.  This is one of the wetter winters we have had in quite some time on the western edge of the Southern Plains.  The last couple of years at this time, we were fighting high winds and wildfires!

    Just today, we had some minor snow, courtesy of a strong cold front and a short wave moving overhead.

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    newyearsevesnow

    Of course, as we often do in winter, storm chasers now start speculating on the coming season, and gaze into the crystal forecast ball looking for any clues on what we can expect for severe weather.

    I’m going out on a limb here with my long range “forecast” and say that the southeast states will soon start seeing repeated severe weather events and tornadoes on a higher frequency than they often do in the late winter months.  As we approach, and move into March, I think things will light up early and last well into June for Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.  I mostly base this forecast crystal ball-cast on two elements.  The El Nino, which may or may not be staring to wane as we move into spring, but otherwise should still be affecting our weather, and two, the moisture we already have had.

    Typically it seems that on years we have very dry winter seasons in Texas and Oklahoma, especially in west Texas, the less active severe weather is west of the I35 corridor.  Mostly this is due to only shallow moisture being able to make it up from the Gulf of Mexico over parched land in drought conditions that likes to leech all it can get from the atmosphere, and the end result is a dryline that races east, leaving everything practically west of I35 in the dry air, and thus no thunderstorms.

    This winter has been the complete opposite of that.  Instead of drought and fires we are decently wet right now.  El Nino should continue to provide the upper storm systems to kick off the rain/snow and eventually thunderstorms when things start warming up.  It’s all up to the mesoscale fine details at that point.

    I got a little more in depth than I intended to their in my post to end out the year, so I’ll leave it at that and we’ll talk more about it a little later!

    I hope everyone got accomplished what they wanted to in 2009, and get more accomplished in 2010!