StormChasingUSA.com blog

Earlier this year I started a thread on StormTrack about how to count tornadoes seen. I have a spreadsheet on my computer where I list the tornadoes I have seen, for my own personal sake and nothing else. I usually don’t post or brag about how many tornadoes I have seen but I do find […]

As I often go with storm chasing tours I am often left with trying to determine the skill of a certain tour guide. That goes as well when I read reviews visitors write on this website. How do you know if a certain storm chaser, like your future tour guide, is skilled or not? I assume […]

I had the pleasure of chasing with Weather Adventures and Blake Knapp this season, right after my chase with Silver Lining Tours. It was interesting to chase with two very different tour companies in the same season. I took the 10 day tour with Weather Adventures during this, overall, bad chase season. Out of the 10 […]

This season I got to chase with two different tour companies back-to-back: Silver Lining Tours and then Weather Adventures. My tour with Silver Lining Tours was a 6 day tour that started on May 26th. The weather on our tour played along quite well (with a few disappointing busts) and we were able to chase […]

I am quite confident there is no one in the world who have been chasing with more storm chasing tour companies than I. Up to this date I have chased with 8 different tour companies: Cloud 9, PDS Storm Tours (no longer active), Tempest Tours, Extreme Chase Tours, Tornadic Expeditions, Tornado Alley Chasing, Silver Lining […]

June 17th was not really a chase day as we had to drive all the way back to Denver. Eastern Colorado did however seem to be some promising for storms and SPC put a 2% on it. Later on they moved that towards southern Kansas and after some actual forecasting we never chased it as […]

Yesterday was supposed to be the Big Day of this tour, i.e. the one with the best parameters, and it did not result in any tornado. After two weeks of disappointments and storms that starts to die or congeal after 1-2 hours, allowing for very little actual storm watching, I have to confess I was […]

This was the big day of the tour. Finally, there was a trough coming in to provide some much needed upper air support, and we were to be positioned in South Dakota. The 5% tornado risk of the day pretty much outlined one of my favorite places in the USA in terms of natural beauty: […]

Today was supposed to be a down day/travel day to put ourselves into position for Sunday, which seems to be the most promising day since I started chasing with Weather Adventures. There was a setup in Minnesota/Iowa but it was too far away and iffy. There was however a marginal setup in the northern direction […]

Today was the best chase day since I started chasing with Weather Adventures. The setup was quite obvious in SW South Dakota with good instability and moisture but only a small pocket of shear, SPC had a super small 5% risk over the area. We drove from our hotel in Spearman, SD, to Rapid City […]

It has now been 10 days since I saw my last tornado on this chasecation. Although that was an all time top-5 chase day for me, the lack of good storms are starting to get frustrating. I know I share this feeling with everyone chasing, except maybe for the ones who saw the Laramie, WY, […]

Today was a day with slim chances of getting something good. SPC had put a slight risk (and 2% tornado risk) over western Nebraska, parts of Colorado and Wyoming. We chose to go to western Nebraska. What happened today was not so much what happened in Nebraska, where we went, but what happened in Wyoming. […]

This was probably one of the most relaxing and, in terms of surroundings, beautiful day ever. We started at our hotel in Denver and went up north towards Montana. We got almost to the border when a storm fired over Montana. We followed it east from the other side of the state border, in Wyoming, […]

After our photo session in the dark, photographing stars, we went back to the same national park (Black Canyon of Gunnison) the next day. It was cool to see everything in the light again and what we did not see last night was how amazing the view was! Amazing and frightening!  Black Canyon is home to […]

As we came in at 2 a.m. after our last chase day it was nice to really be able to sleep in on Day 7, which was my transition day between Silver Lining Tours and Weather Adventures. I will write a complete review of Silver Lining Tours later on but I had a good time […]