StormChasingUSA.com blog

I had some shaky and low quality video clips from the Goshen County-tornado I saw on my tour with Cloud 9 Tours back in 2009 (June 5th). It was the first tornado I ever saw and is still the best one. The tornado was covered by many chasers as well as the Vortex 2-project. The […]

Yesterday I tried to pull an April Fools-joke on my Twitter-followers hoping the Storm Chasing-community would be amused. Basically, what I did was to copy the hook echo created on the day of the Joplin-tornado, which is an obvious tornado echo with the debris ball and everything. I also took a screen dump of the […]

When I went on my first chase back in 2009 I really did not expect to make it a habit but it really stuck to me and I am now booked for my 6th season! I will be landing on May 19th to chase with Tornadic Expeditions (Erik Burns) for a week and then chase […]

Our last day in Tulsa was just spent hanging out and I really needed the rest after over two weeks on the road with very few days of resting. We took the time to clean up the car and go out for a bit of dinner. If I would sum these last two weeks I […]

The best target for the day was probably Illinois but we needed to get back to Tulsa in order not to stress back the day after. So, we conveniently picked north central Kansas instead. It had decent CAPE, good moisture but the shear was not great. Northwestern Kansas looked a little bit better but going […]

Yesterday we (well, mostly David) did a thorough forecast for today and, just like most others, came up with eastern or northeastern Nebraska as our target area for the day. The moisture was excellent, the shear was good, the CAPE was ok and there seemed to be enough lift. Our only worry was the lack […]

Although Colorado looked really good today, my choice was already made yesterday and I neither could nor wanted to get out on the roads again just yet. I had a lot of catching up to do in terms of work and rest and it felt really good to wake up and not having to drive […]

We woke up and had a quick breakfast before leaving for the Nebraska/Kansas-border which was our target for the day. The predicted storm area was quite large where Colorado had the better lift but north Kansas had amazing CAPE and great shear. The day really sounded promising, as long as the lift would be there! […]

…this day would have been the most disappointing chase day ever! I know I refer a lot to SPC and their rating of risks etc. Mainly, it is because I am not skilled enough to do my own forecasts and assess that risk myself. So, when I saw an Enhanced Risk and 10% Tornado Risk […]

I only slept three hours that night and was a bit of a wreck when I got into the car again. For the first time while chasing, I was looking at the SPC reports as Slight RISK and 5% tornado RISK. Previously, I had been looking at it as 5% tornado chance but, as mentioned, […]

The play of the day was Montana which obviously was an impossible target for us. We still felt like chasing though and our forecasting (as well as SPC) hinted at a meager chance of supercells in the Texas panhandle (again). We did not have anything better to do, or chase, so we thought we might […]

Our only real plan for Sunday was to go to Rocky Raskovitchs storm chaser picnic in Piedmont outside of Oklahoma City, so David and I went out there. I was kind of hoping to find someone I might be able to chase with since I was looking left and right for options. Some 15 chasers […]