StormChasingUSA.com blog

We had a vote at lunch about whether we should go home to Tulsa or chase up north. Since we were driving on our spare tire and the setup did not look to good my vote was on going home. Akos, the constantly positive Hungarian, convinced us on chasing so we went up to chase […]

I woke up with a nice, peaceful feeling from the day before. Storm chasing is at its best when you can stand and watch a slow moving storm and take good time to take photos, enjoy and plan ahead. I really loved that! That nice, peaceful feeling came to an abrupt halt when we realized […]

As today was a very marginal day we chose to really sleep in and catch up on some work. We didn’t leave Lincoln, NE, until after a nice lunch at Ihop and headed east towards Topeka, KS, to play the dryline again. The dewpoints and temperatures were super high so it was almost painful to […]

This day ended in a way like many other days this trip. We go home after a rather successful day without seeing any tornadoes. David looks at his phone and says: “Wait a minute, I think there was a tornado here”. Today was the 3rd time this happened!  After the incredible tornado day yesterday we were […]

Just like a couple of other days this year, June 12th started off looking really great. All storm related parameters were super high but there was a great risk of all the storms firing at the same time, causing a big mess that would erode the entire day – just like May 26th last year. The […]

Today’s main target was really Minnesota, although it looked like squall lines and night time chasing. Fortunately, in the morning it turned out SE Wyoming would actually have a chance to produce severe weather. SPC even put a 2% tornado risk in the area where were more or less just prepared to have a down […]

Although Minnesota looked like a better target for Sunday we had to leave for Wyoming to pick up the newest member of our team: Akos from Hungary. To get there we had to drive through Montana, which really was an experience. Green hills, mountains with snow caps in the background and great plains. It was […]

After that 13 hour drive the day before, we sure needed some rest, and got some as well. This was the day we have been looking for, the hodographs showed perfect winds and most parameters were pointing towards a great chase day. SPC had a 5% tornado risk and it seemed liked there would not […]

We decided to head for the North Dakota-target as it showed great potential. It was a looong run, especially since we have to get back to at least Denver as Alex is going home and Akos is coming along with us. Still, we are here to chase and this was the place to go. The […]

We woke up to a day that turned out slightly better than we anticipated and we were thankful to have our first real chase day of the trip! The parameters were decent: good CAPE, decent moisture, lift but not as much shear.  As we were already in the target area we could have a long […]

After the morning’s forecast we had the option of going some 3 hours east to chase really bad storms or going down almost all the way to New Mexico to, most likely, miss some slightly better looking storms. Instead, we went up the mountains again to hike and drive Mount Evens road, the highest located […]

Early on this day David made a forecast and we realized that there would be very meager storms at best within a 3 hour drive (i.e. 6 hours in total) so we decided to call it a Down Day and go up hiking in the mountains instead, in Rocky Mountain National Park. There was a […]

There is really not much to say about June 4th, Day 2 on this chase, other than it was a looong day. We got up and into the Stormtrooper at 9 a.m. and finally arrived in Denver at 10.30, some 13.5 hours later! That did include a stop in Wakita, OK, for a visit to […]

I arrived late on June 2nd after a long but pretty decent flight. Well, outside of the fact that I lost my iPhone on the first leg of the flight! It was a matter of many small coincidences as I am usually quite careful when it comes to my iPhone. It really sucks as it […]

When I first made StormChasingUSA.com back in 2009, it was not a pretty website but quite useful from the start. It was made in php with a lot of “cut and paste”-coding that made it buggy and without any really useful tools. A couple of years later I made a complete makeover of it, with […]