Interesting near-end-of-season setup

We've both been pretty quiet here recently; most of this is due to personal circumstances but also it's been due to a lack of good storms and setups to chase.

Tomorrow may be different.  Finally, something to talk about.

Moisture: good dewpoints are already in place, in the mid-teens, but 20s are lurking in ND.  They should advect north by tomorrow.

Instability: this is conditionally problematic, but with cooling aloft, should the dry slot of the upcoming system be relatively cloud-free (even for an hour) this will cease to be a problem, with 2000+ j/kg MLCAPE.

Shear: this is interesting; the deep-layer shear will be adequate but the profiles themselves may lead to weird storm modes.

Trigger: not a problem with a sub-1000 mb low coming our way, accompanied by all the requisite fronts.

Here's a prog sounding for Carman, MB, for 7 PM.  Note the implied convection.

So here's what I think will happen: a bunch of overnight and morning storms will drop tons of moisture.  This moisture as well as that advected in will make for potential instability.  The dry slot of the low-pressure system will move over the Red River Valley by mid afternoon, setting the stage.  It'll just be a question of whether the low clouds in the dry slot will mix out.  I think they will, as it'll be a rather windy day (turbulent mixing) and the sun is relatively high in the sky (convective mixing).  Then, around 5 or 6 PM, a few storms will go up and quickly become severe.  I think supercells with heavy rain, wind and hail will occur.  (Justin disagrees with me on the hail because of the warm atmosphere; I think the steep lapse rates and supercell structures will compensate for that and make for loonies or bigger; we have a bet on it.)  The vertical wind profile looks a little bit goofy for tornadic supercells, because it exhibits a veer-back pattern, which tends to make the storms rain into the updraft, and as a result they can't live as long.  As well, the resultant storm motion, aside from strongly deviant motion, will be into lower and lower instability.  So it's not ideal for tornadoes, but it's not horrible.  Low-level turning could provide for a few tornadoes,  but this doesn't scream long-track violent tornadoes, either.  I think tornadoes will be relatively early in the event, if any.  Then it'll blow up into an area of rain and thunderstorms that will move into northwestern Ontario.

Consecutive runs of various models have been pulling the low farther and farther west; a few days ago this setup looked like it would be primarily a northwest Ontario one, and perhaps in the jungles of eastern Manitoba.  Now, it's changing in favour of chasers.

Good luck and stay safe!

Storm chase with CoD

So tomorrow I will be embarking on a chase with CoD.  I'll likely be tweeting and blogging, but I'm not sure which account or accounts I'll be using.  Here are the possible ones:

Blogs:
http://daveandjustinweather.blogspot.com/
http://wxcentral.blogspot.com/

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/StormStructure
https://twitter.com/cod_stormchase

It looks like Saturday will be a chase day, either in Kansas or Nebraska. Long-range models indicate that most days should be chaseable days, too.

(cross-posted at Weather Central Blog)

Saturday, the last day: high risk, high reward?

So today almost every chaser is playing the Black Hills magic.  We would be doing so, too, if we didn't have to be in Omaha early tomorrow morning.

So we decided to play in the area of plan B, a high risk, high reward setup.

All the ingredients--moisture, instability, lift and shear (marginally) are in place today across central Nebraska, and we are going to play the area.  It's entirely possible that we get a sunburn today, but if storms go in the environment, we will likely be looking at either HP or wet classic supercells.  Low wall clouds and big big hail.  Which we will avoid, naturally.

The Black Hills just got a tornado watch as I wrote this, so it would have been our 4th tornado watch during this week-long trip.

Not that *that* has helped us at all.  ;)

Friday's chase: storm structure

We kept saying Wray, Colorado.  That was the place to be.

After a quick lunch in Lamar, CO, we went north to Wray, and when we got there, a good area of cumuli was bubbling up.  It pointed to the fact that there was persistent lift and convergence there, so we waited.

As we watched, storms went up in front of us, and we decided to play a bit north, as a) the best-looking storm (both visually and on RADAR) was there, and b) the deep-layer shear would be better there.

We ended up getting on a couple of LP-looking supercells,one of which produced golf ball sized hail in Holyoke, NE.  It kept going and going, as storms around us kept trying to go up.  But this one persisted.

We (read: I) were ready to abandon the storm numerous times, but cooler heads prevailed--the storm kept on appearing to die on RADAR, but it would still look good visually--a well-separated region of updraft and downdraft.  So we stayed, and we were rewarded with hanging out on the storm of the day.  The one clue that told me that maybe we should stay was that, despite, low reflectivities being present, the echo tops were still above 50,000 feet.  A good top, for sure.

We kept going on and watching this storm which happened to be moving slowly--maybe 30 km/h, at most--and it slowly gained a better look on RADAR.  Soon it got severe warned, with big hail once again being the big threat.

Of course, this had to happen right around dusk, so that chasing wouldn't last too much longer.  And wouldn't you know it, but the storm decided to go absolutely crazy just when it got too dark to see properly--give-up time, in other words.  The tops got even higher, the reflectivity got more of a classic shape, and rotation really got up there.  So much so that the NWS issued a tornado warning on it.

Crap!

Well, we weren't going to chase it at night, as that's just too dangerous.  So we went back to the hotel, secure in the knowledge that a) we were on the right storm and b) we got some good photos from the hours and hours we spent watching it.

Summary of Thursday, May 23

Well, we were on the right storm.

A morning outflow boundary was moving westward through the Texas panhandle, and it would prove to be the focus for severe thunderstorm development.

A clump of agitated cumuli got going east of Plainview early in the afternoon, and we knew that was where we had to go.

When we got to the storm, it had just been tornado warned--a couple of landspouts were reported in its updraft phase.  But it was showing nice reflectivity structure, although it wasn't actually showing much rotation on the Doppler.

We followed this storm for a couple of hours as it moved slowly south, kicking up a tremendous amount of dust as it did so.  At one point, the dust was being kicked up and seemingly ingested into the inflow--something that we will have to look at on video, as it had the chance and was in the right position to be a tornado.  (Personally, I don't think so, but we will see.)

Here's where we were in relation to it.  Our location is the white circle.

After a while, that storm started to collapse and become outflow-dominant, but there were new storms going up to their southeast.  We went after those, and one began to be the dominant storm, showing a good inflow notch and some rotation.

Soon after we got there, it was tornado warned.  It looked more likely to produce, visually, but the low-level rotation never really tightened up.  I'm not sure why--whether it was because the upper level winds didn't evacuate the updraft column quickly enough, or because of some other thing I can't think of right now.

Anyhow, it also turned into this big blob that went linear, so we bailed and decided to make for our hotel room.

On the way, we made a couple of stops; at the first one we met up with a bunch of chasers including Reed Timmer, and at the second we met up with Greg Johnson.

As a bonus, I finally got to eat a long-time storm chaser food staple, an Allsups burrito.Not bad, not great.

Tomorrow looks pretty good in western Kansas and/or eastern Colorado.  We will refine the area tomorrow.

Thursday

Yesterday was a down day, as the cold front had swept the moisture away.  Not too far, however.

This morning we woke up with a lot moire moisture in the air (dewpoint approaching 20) and an outflow boundary nearby from overnight storms in Oklahoma.  The moisture is streaming northwest, and a short-wave trough can be seen coming out of the desert southwest.

As a result, the SPC has issued a moderate risk for severe thunderstorms pretty much in the area we had been focusing on.  Good.

So we will see what today brings, but I remain optimistic.

May 20, 2013

An historic tornado occurred yesterday in Moore, OK.

More on that in a bit.

We started off the morning in Omaha, NE, looking toward OKC as an initial target.  A dryline/cold front intersection was forecast to sit just west of that city.  All the parameters--moisture, instability, shear, lift--were in place, so we figured it was a lock.

We left at about 8 AM, and OKC was reachable by 2 PM.

Then things went wrong.  An 18Z sounding went up from Norman (they actually sent it at 17:15Z, 12:15 PM) and it showed moist and very unstable atmosphere, basically uncapped.

Uh oh.

Soon after that, the MD went out and then a tornado watch.  As expected, it was for serious storms with big hail and damaging winds, in addition to the expected tornadoes (with a few long track/damaging ones possible).

As luck would have it, storms started firing up shortly after 18Z, right along the dryline and the cold front.  We were north of it at this point, still in Kansas, so we had to hurry.

Then.

A storm initiated near Newcastle, just west of Moore.  It got tornado warned almost immediately.  Which was a good thing, as it started to produce a tornado fairly quickly.

An aside about the normal behaviour of supercells.  Usually they initiate and take a long time to wind up and produce tornadoes.  On the order of an hour or so, sometimes 2.

Also as an aside, storm initiation in this part of the world (most of North America, aside from the Gulf Coast) tends to be during the mid afternoon.  3 or 4 PM.  Or sometimes 6 or 7.  So when storms went up in the early afternoon, we weren't ready, and nor were we in position.

This was our eventual downfall, as the storm was crossing our projected path, and there was no way we could get in front of it before it crossed I-35, so we had to cut east and then south, to try and get ahead of the storm without it hitting us and getting the vehicle damaged or destroyed by hail.

After some driving slowness through some towns, we eventually ended up straight east of the storm.

Which was, of course, exactly when the tornado decided to lift.  All the time we had been listening to radio from OKC talking about how big and nasty the tornado was, and how it was grinding through parts of Newcastle and Moore.  The TDWR at KOKC was showing a tightly coiled spiral of reflectivity (note to self: download that later) and the the WSR-88D showed something that I never like to see: a region of high reflectivity in the hook, a huge rotational couplet and associated very low correlation coefficient.  This combination of signatures is fairly well correlated with tornado debris, so much that this combination is called a tornadic debris signature or a debris ball.  (Usually the reflectivity and CC are fairly circular.)

Anyhow, long story short, we didn't see a tornado, and the storm structure, such as it was, was obscured a lot by haze.

We went to our hotel in Ada, OK, to prepare for today.

Speaking of which, it looks like the same kind of conditions are coming together this afternoon (but hopefully not *early* this afternoon) around Dallas, our initial broad target.  I hope it's not a repeat of yesterday.

We're away tomorrow!

So tomorrow CStam and I will be jumping in the car and meeting up with Kyle, Neil and Justin in Omaha. They're flying in there. On the way, it looks like we may have some chasing to do--something that'll perhaps mess up our picking them up at the airport. Anyhow. The setup isn't perfect, at least in places we have a realistic shot at chasing, as the flow is a little odd--mostly meridional. That being said, I caught 4 tornadoes one day in 2005 in southern Saskatchewan in a meridional flow. Here are the forecast parameters. I've chosen 21Z, as it appears storms could go by then. Moisture: 850 mb dewpoints above 12°C and surface dewpoints above 18°C are forecast by the model. I believe this, as there are currently 16 dews in place in Omaha, and upstream, in eastern Oklahoma, they're well into the 20s.





Instability: this is perhaps the ingredient about which I have the most concern. Because this system is very dynamically strong, there may be a lot of cloud in place all day, limiting the amount of sun that can hit the ground and warm the air.

 

Lift: There's tons available. Such a strong system tends to have air rising all over the place. To boot, though, it looks like Omaha will be in the left exit of the 500 mb jet--a favoured area for enhanced lift. Shear: Should be good, at least in a deep-layer sense. The 500 mb winds near 50 knots should ensure that. However, the directional shear isn't ideal, but not horrible--the storm motion should be eastward, and the updraft evacuation should make all the rain and hail and such move away from the inflow region--to the north, mostly.

 

So we'll see. I suspect we'll get some good storms, and if we can make it a bit farther south, things only improve from there. Here's a forecast sounding and the forecast storm motion, always a consideration when chasing.

 

As a bonus, I thought I'd add a forecast sounding and hodograph for near Oklahoma City on Monday. If this comes true, a) there will be a ton of chasers out there and b) there will be crazy storms in the area.

 

Christmas Day mayhem along the Gulf Coast?

I put a question mark in the title, as there's still some uncertainty about how much mayhem there'll be.  That being said, the ingredients are more or less coming together for a severe weather outbreak on Christmas Day in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle.

Moisture, instability, shear and trigger will all be there, and I've got the corresponding maps below.  But to summarize: dewpoints will be in the mid to upper teens; MLCAPE will be in excess of 1000 and, in some cases, 2000 J/kg; shear will be plentiful, with deep shear around 50 knots and 0-1 km shear around 30; the triggers will be numerous, including likely seabreeze interactions as well as a cold front.

So, what could happen?

Scenario 1) the warm sector lights up with tornadic supercells
Scenario 2) the warm sector is clagged in with low cloud and fog, eliminating any severe weather threat
Scenario 3) the warm sector is capped, leading to only cold front convection

Scenario 1 seems to be fairly likely right now, although there may be so many storms that they destructively interfere with one another.  Scenario 2 looks unlikely, as for that to happen you need to have a strong inversion due to really warm air aloft (~850 mb) to trap things, and that's not currently forecast.  Scenario 3 also looks unlikely, as there's little cap to speak of forecast.

The most favourable juxtaposition of instability and shear looks to be from about central Louisiana to western Mississippi, with a second area in southern Alabama.  That being said, it appears that the strength of tornadoes may be somewhat mitigated because of what the forecast soundings in the warm sector are showing: modest, at most, low-level instability, usually necessary for strong low-level vertical motion.  As well, low-level turning of the winds isn't tremendous, albeit adequate for tornadic supercells.  If winds can back locally, though, then that'll increase the helicity a lot.

The place where forecast soundings do show stronger low-level instability is in western Louisiana, that being along the cold front.  So if the cold front isn't too aggressive and surface winds can stay backed, the area of strongest storms and highest tornado chances would be here.

Last two things about these storms: they are going to have low cloud bases. As in almost at the ground. So any storms that do form will make it very dark, almost impossible to see what's coming.  Second, a lot of these storms could go well after nightfall.  If, indeed, they do contain tornadoes, this would be the most dangerous time--tornadoes at night are that much more dangerous.


I hope people keep an eye on the weather on the Gulf Coast on Christmas Day.

Not even a lightning strike

We got to Eau Claire and it was cloudy, drizzly and about 20 degrees.  Close to the warm sector.  After a lunch stop, we decided to drop south to La Crosse, where it turned out to be about 23/18.  Not bad but, unfortunately, too cloudy--and therefore the cap wasn't able to break.

We were, however, able to call the chase relatively early (6 PM) because darkness came on so early.  A silver lining, I suppose, to that cloud.

October chase possible? Really?

I'm going to be in Minnesota tomorrow, visiting. The visit is totally unrelated to chasing, but it appears I may have something to chase tomorrow.

No, really, I'm serious.

Here's the setup.

Moisture: it's looking pretty good.  I checked the current obs, and there's already a 64F (18C) dewpoint in northeastern Iowa.  Don't believe me?  Have a look-see.

And by tomorrow afternoon it's forecast to only get better, both at 850 and at the surface.

And as a result, the instability is forecast to be very good.

3000 J/kg?  In October?  I'll take that in June!
How about the upper winds and therefore shear?

Plentiful.  Combine that with good low-level veering and that would give a fairly chaseable storm motion of around 20 knots.

So, what to do?  Here's a prog sounding for the region, around 4 PM.

There are 2 negatives I can see for this case.  First off, it's not the best chasing territory; that part of the world tends to be rather hilly and treed, with not as many navigable, straight roads as in the plains.  Second, it's October, so that means sunset will be around 7 PM--not a huge window of daytime opportunity.

If this setup holds, it looks like we will be going for a target of Eau Claire and watching things develop.  Wish us luck!

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.

An actual post about the last chase day

I suppose I ought to post about yesterday's chase. We decided to play the edge of the cap and its intersection with the sagging cold front--said cold front was sagging through Nebraska. We got in place nice and early and sat to play the waiting game. And wait we did. We were pretty close to initiation, too, and when it went, we saw some pretty neat storms. The storm that looked the best was a little to our southwest; it had a ragged, albeit somewhat high-based, wall cloud, and the updraft/downdraft separation was obvious. After a few minutes, a rather interesting dust swirl appeared on the ground, a little offset from being right underneath the wall cloud but not by much. It persisted for a few minutes and moved off, and it was clear by the end of its life that it was a gustnado. A few minutes later, another one formed and behaved much in the same manner. Eventually the storm really started to move (~70 km/h) so we had to take off to keep up with it. Problem was, we had the Missouri River to contend with. There aren't unlimited crossings, so we had to cross it south of the storm's path, as it was going right toward another crossing. The crossing was about 20 miles south of the storm, just far enough that we couldn't see it. While we were turning east to get to the river crossing, we witnessed a close call for an accident. I won't go into the details (no, it didn't involve us) but it just goes to show: the most dangerous part of storm chasing is the driving. Anyhow, we finally got back around to see the storm and it was waging an epic battle between outflow and inflow. It would appear, at various times, to have a huge gust front and then the storm would surge ahead of it and there would be an obvious wall cloud. Anyhow, we chased it (literally) for about 3 hours before giving up, as it was still moving away to us at such a speed that we could barely match, and it was starting to get dark. So we decided to stop, tripod and take lightning pictures. Wouldn't you know it, another storm popped up to our west, and it got severe warned. So after finishing up our lightning pictures, we decided to core punch. I know, I know, I rail against it, but we had good reason to believe that this core wouldn't be all that bad--for one, its RADAR presentation was that it was putting out quarter-sized hail, maybe, and for two, the largest hail that had been reported in the area from any storm was quarter-sized. So we went for it. Once we hit the core, we had to stop. Visibility was zero in heavy rain and small hail (we missed the bigger stuff) and, although I really really suck at estimating wind speeds, I wouldn't be surprised if the winds met the NWS severe criterion. The storm soon passed and we went to the hotel for the night. Not a bad day.

Day the last: retrospective

So we're now on our way back home, after a somewhat anticlimactic trip. This year, aside from a couple of little errors here and there that didn't really cost us, we by and large were in the right place. Too bad we can't say the same thing about moisture. A couple of weeks ago, a cold front smashed through the US and shunted all the deep moisture into the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, a return southerly flow has been reluctant to set up and as a result, the available moisture has been just what was already in place. So instead of May dewpoints in the low 20s, we were looking at may dewpoints in the low teens. Marginal moisture for this time of year. So I'm feeling a little discouraged--not for myself, as I have many more chase days planned this summer, and not for Hobson, because he's going to chase every cumulus cloud for the rest of the summer, but for the other guys who don't get too much of a chance to chase. This would put me off chasing for a while if it were me. I always go back to wxdog's mantra: there'll always be more storms. Man, I hope so.

Oh moisture, moisture, wherefore art thou, moisture?

This trip has been marked by a lack of moisture. May is usually moist in the southern and central plains. But a couple of weeks ago a cold front blasted through the states and flushed the moisture out of the region. It's because of this cold front that storms have struggled to get really meaty during this trip. Even the tornadoes that have happened while we were here (that we missed, naturally) have been short-lived. This is just not a scenario I had even considered to be possible in late May here. Anyhow, yesterday we got to our target of Valentine, NE (can't be a chase trip without at least once going through Cherry County) and storms were starting to go. We didn't have a great visual because a) it was pretty hazy and b) there was lots of cirrus overhead. Still, though, RADAR was great help to us. A storm eventually went in our area and was looking pretty good on RADAR, and it even got severe warned. Then we got within viewing distance and, wouldn't you know it, the storm up and died. Like the previous day it wasn't a quick death; it took a few minutes to completely choke off, and it even made one valiant attempt at regeneration. But in the end, it seems the storm killers struck again. There were a couple of silver linings in that cloud, however: first, because we didn't go north, we didn't waste a whole bunch of money and time on storms that were underwhelming; second, we got a couple of good lightning shots. Today is looking not bad, although the orientation of the shear vectors with respect to the forcing isn't all that good. A cold front will be sagging through southern Nebraska and western Iowa, and storms should fire along it. Whether they put out for us is another question, but you never know--mesoscale accidents happen all the time. Or so I hear.

Day 3 recap and day 4

So we ended up in New Mexico for lunch, waiting for storms to start in that region. They soon did, with towers going up over the Raton Mesa area. Thing is, they stayed on the rocks for a long long time. They just kept pounding the same area; at one point, the hail markers on GR were over 3 inches. I figure there had to be some flash flooding somewhere in northeast New Mexico yesterday. We sat on Bob's road for a while then, watching and waiting, all the while tossing around the football. Storms then decided to move--slowly, mind you--off the terrain but by this point there were a bunch of them, and it looked like destructive interference was occurring. In addition, we were getting chilly--I had to put on my hoodie. But at one point, a storm just to our northwest seemed to have a good look to it, sort of LP. It didn't look that hot on RADAR, so we made an executive decision to go after towers that were looking pretty healthy to our northeast. We also noted a line of cumuli trying to get interesting well east of the cluster action, in the western Texas panhandle. As we got a little farther east, the towers to the northeast were visually and on RADAR looking increasingly meh. So we decided at that point that we would go to Kansas and call it a night, repositioning for the next day (today). Along the way we were watching an interesting storm all by its lonesome in southwest Kansas. It was clearly a multicell, as the anvil being blown downwind would show a wavelike formation, indicating successive updraft pulses. It gradually began to acquire a backsheared anvil, so we decided to investigate. As we got closer, reports of golf ball hail from the now-warned storm came in, and it looked impressive. But, as seems to happen a lot, the storm decided to stop its production of anything once we got within looking distance; it didn't die as quickly as the storm the previous evening, but it was clearly dying. So we decided to drive along to dinner and bed for the evening whereupon we saw that the line of cumuli in the west Texas panhandle had grown into a beast of a supercell, and tornado reports were coming in from it. D'oh! The hail marker was well over 3 inches, and it had a pretty meaty RADAR presentation, so it looked to me like it was an HP beast with a tornado in there somewhere. It didn't last too long, however, as it was quickly to be overtaken by a pretty impressive squall line that evolved from the cluster we had been on a few hours before. Now onto today. Today looks like a gamble, in a weird kind of way. For a few reasons (don't want to drive crazy amounts, skeptical about moisture) we decided to forgo the risk in the Dakotas (close to home) and chase down the lee trough in Nebraska. A lot of chasers are in the Dakotas today, but it's been my experience that, in these strongly-forced situations, storms go early and in big numbers, while farther down the line, in the more capped environment, a more isolated beast goes up. We're hoping for and banking on that. As always, time will tell.

Day 2 recap and day 3

Yesterday was an interesting day, once again. Then again, I see all storm chase days as interesting. We left the hotel after a good night's sleep and set out with our initial target as Lawton, OK. Along the way we saw that there was a smattering of boundaries out there--some outflow, some a decelerating cold front--just south of Frederick. We thus redefined our target as just south of there in Texas. We got to Texas (first time for 3/5 of us!) and got there just in time for the first set of towers going up. We couldn't see them all that well, though, because there was a lot of low-level grunge around. But a couple of storms got organized around us, and we were in business. Soon the storm to our northwest got pretty powerful and the hail marker on GR was showing over 3 inches, which is usually a sign that a storm is making at least golf ball-sized ice cubes. Anyhow, the storm was struggling to stay in the warm air, as it had formed on the boundary but was being overtaken by it, so it was at times looking good and at times looking no so good. We were wondering if this storm was going to do anything when, farther west in better air, a storm rocketed up near Guthrie, TX. Because of the better moisture in place and the lack of destructive interference going on, we made the snap decision to go to that one. It soon looked rather impressive on RADAR, and we knew we had made the right call. Then the NWS dropped the severe thunderstorm warning on the storm. We then questioned our earlier decision, but the storms we had left were looking worse and worse, both visually and on RADAR. So we pressed on, and soon enough the warning was re-issued for the storm. We got close to it and it looked not bad, a sort of LP-type storm with a fairly tilted updraft and obvious hail core. Speaking of which, tennis ball-sized hail got reported with this storm south of Guthrie, so we knew it was a pretty good one.

Then one thing Justin and I had seen once before happened: pretty much right before our eyes, the storm evaporated. Poof, pretty much gone from great storm to nothing in about 20 minutes. Pretty impressive. We knew we were done for the day and therefore took off for our hotel in Childress, TX. Along the way, though, we had to stop to watch the eclipse which, if it wasn't total where we were, it was close. Justin got video of it which he tells me he will post at some point. Anyway, the eclipse was way cooler than I had ever imagined, and I think it was enhanced by the fact that it was low on the horizon and therefore we got an eclipse of the setting sun. All red and beautiful. I now see why people pay huge amounts of money to see eclipses.

A good day, and a bonus eclipse! **As I was writing this we got pulled over for speeding. The talk in the van unfortunately made us miss a slower speed limit sign, and we were caught going well over the speed limit. However, the policeman was pretty cool about it, first asking us where Manitoba is. He let us off with a warning. So to the anonymous policeman in Estelline, TX, thank you.**

Day 2 in OK and TX

Looks like we're going to be playing in Oklahoma and Texas today, from Lawton OK to Wichita Falls, TX to Childress, TX. Its a fairly marginal day, with all right CAPEs and marginal shear, but it's something to look at. Still, though, the way the setup is, there could be some fairly loopy hodographs. My main concern is that there's little capping so things could end up being pretty messy and multicellular. That being said, we can't rule out a mesoscale accident, as happened west of Wichita yesterday afternoon. A number of pretty tornadoes happened around there, and the shear was pretty crappy. So time will tell...

Day 1: better than it ought to have been

We caught some neat storms today, and I would submit that it was worth the lack of sleep and driving all day. We essentially got to areas southwest of Omaha and caught a supercell that gave us some hope and wall clouds. At times it looked like it would produce, as it was sucking air in pretty consistently at an estimated 25 knots. And just when we thought it was over, another burst of air ingestion would occur, making it look like it was about to produce. Given the relatively low dewpoints, I suppose we couldn't expect tornadoes, but it's nice to hope.

On the road

We got on the road at a ridiculously early hour, 4 AM. This after I had just come back from a week-long work trip 4 hours before. Apparently we're hardcore. Anyhow, we're targeting, at least initially, Omaha, NE, where modest moisture and good flow should combine to produce some nice storms. There were some bumps along the way, specifically with regard to data, but my wife fixed those problems for us (thanks, sweetie!) and we are no longer running blind. If you want to follow along on Twitter, we're likely to have more up-to-date bite-sized nuggets of observations. Follow me @StormStructure, Hobson @justinhobson85, or Chris @CKStamms.