Thursday, August 2, 2012

2012 so far

I haven't posted in a long time here--my fault, although I suppose my reader (haha) doesn't check here that much. That said, for me, this year has been a disappointing one. I have had one bad decision and a bunch of bad luck/bad timing events. First the bad luck. This event is one we decided to blow off because, until the afternoon of the day of, it looked highly conditional as to whether the cap would be broken at all. We knew, however, that should a storm go, it would produce. We ended our trip and therefore missed this event. Then it was time to chase with CoD. This time, we were in the right position for every storm that went, but the flow was uncharacteristically slack for the time of year, and storms were mainly multicell stuff. Some storms had a slight chance, but they ended up being outflow-dominant. Then this event with this tornado and this tornado happened in Saskatchewan. I couldn't go because of work, but I knew it would be a good one. My third (long) trip of the year was with my wife. Again, the flow was slack and mainly multicells were the dominant mode. We got some good lightning shots, but storm structure was just lacking. Had we had our trip a week later, we would have caught this along with CoD, who was on their trip 5 of the year. I've been on a couple of spot chases. One storm in northwest North Dakota was outflow-dominant and messy, and a couple in southern Manitoba really had no chance but were marginally-severe hailers. I know that there'll always be more storms, but this year it seems (to me) that I've just got the worst luck. There's still about a month left in the storm season, so there's still hope.