StormChasingUSA.com blog

Almost two years ago I started working on StormCenter (formerly named StormWindow), a web application where you can explore and analyze storms, tornadoes and storm chaser activity in the last 24 hours. You can see photos, videos chasers have posted as well as zooming in on a specific time and location. See who was close […]

Chasing with Extreme Tornado Tours (ETT) was a long awaited trip for me. I was originally scheduled to go with ETT in 2020 but could not go because of Covid. It was not until this year (2023) I could finally go – after the longest hiatus I have had in storm chasing since 2009-2013. For […]

I have been home for a week now since my storm chasing tour with Extreme Tornado Tours in the beginning of May. It turned out that the throat pain I had during the tour was tonsillitis, that was growing worse every day on the tour. I was taking aspirin and cough drops every day on […]

Day 6 was our last day of chasing and although SPC had a 2% tornado risk for our area, the actual chance of seeing a tornado was very low, mainly due to a high dew point/temperature spread that would keep the cloud bases high. The risk for very large hail was higher than the day […]

The last two days were not as promising as the Thursday and would offer chasing both days, with hail as the main risk and with very slim tornado chances. However, an option appeared to us at this moment. Northwestern Missouri had opened up to be a potential target for tornadoes on Day 6. We had […]

Day 4 was supposed to be our “Big Day”, it had been forecasted as such since Day 1, not only by our tour guides but by SPC and most in the storm chaser community. The night before SPC put a 5% tornado risk in southwestern Oklahoma and parts of Texas. Our tour guides did however […]

Today was the first day with some potential of actually seeing a supercell. The models were showing some support for this in the OK panhandle so we moved north. The storms were coming in slooowly from New Mexico and we found some beautiful piece of completely flat land to watch the high based storms coming […]

Day 2 was supposedly a chase day, even though it was very marginal. There was riska area over parts of west Texas up to Amarillo and the tour guides chose to stay around for the northern target, which meant we would stay put in Amarillo. I had been feeling a bit sick so I took […]

I arrived to Oklahoma city at 8 pm, dead tired and crashed directly to bed. I had at that time checked out what people were saying about the upcoming week, and my heart sunk. There were mentions of Omega Blocks and Death Ridges, words you don’t want to hear about the single week you chose […]

I am currently sitting at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam while writing this blog post, on my way to my first storm chasing vacation in four years! I went chasing in 2019, I was scheduled to go in 2020, I wasn’t really expecting to be able go in 2021 (which turned out to be true) […]

2019 was the last time I went chasing storms and, man, have I been missing it – but now I am finally coming back! The reason for not going in 2020 and 2021 is obvious but this year the timing just wasn’t good. For 11 years, I worked full-time with my own business and had […]

Update as of 2023-09-15: This application is now under StormCenter.app and is called StormCenter I am happy to finally be able to launch a web application I started making last summer but haven’t come around to finish until now: StormWindow. StormWindow is a web application where you can get an overview of what is going […]

Note: The image is NOT a scene from any of the movies mentioned but rather just some photo editing. Although tornadoes are frequent in movies they are often pictured more as a backdrop to enhance a disaster movie or the likes of it. The storm chasing community has not been spoiled with great movies – […]

As you may be very well aware of, the storm chasing tours have been severely impacted by the Covid-19 outbreak and the subsequent travel bans. Many tour companies cancelled their tours in 2020 completely and those who didn’t only held very few and highly restricted tours. For most, 2020 was a terrible year for chasing […]

There is no clickbait and no surprise here. Covid-19 is putting its ugly wet blanket over this season for me and (almost) all fellow storm chasing europeans and most other non-americans. The borders are still closed and even if they would open up I would assume it would only be for vaccinated people. In Sweden, […]