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March 07, 2007

Twister

I don't know how I haven't blogged about this yet because it was absolutely the most interesting thing I have ever done, but I thought it was time to do a post of my storm chasing trip I went on in June of 2003. For those of you who are huge weather nerds (probably no one) you know that June 24, 2003 was an enormous day in meteorology, it was the tornado outbreak in the Northern Plains (Nebraska and South Dakota). It actually set the record for the most tornadoes EVER in a 24 hour period! I've always wanted to be a tornado chaser and no, not because of the movie Twister, it started long before Bill Paxton took to the roads of Kansas. However, having been storm chasing, it certainly wasn't entirely dissimilar to Twister. Anyway, it was AMAZING and I am absolutely going again and again and again. I went with my dad with Storm Chasing Adventure Tours, and I highly recommend them if you want to go yourself.

So, my dad and I flew into Denver, Colorado where we all stayed for the first night where we (about 14 of us) had an orientation meeting before leaving at the crack of dawn the next morning. I could go into so much detail in this entry because even four years later I still remember everything that happened, but this would end up being about 30 pages long not including pictures... and probably most of you don't care anyway. With that in mind, the trip was five days long and we didn't see any tornadoes until the last day when we saw twenty-three, so everything up until then will be kept brief, not to say that it wasn't just as fun touring a completely new part of the country with amazing thunderstorms despite not seeing tornadoes.

So one thing to be said about the states we were in (Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and briefly Iowa)is that they must not have a whole lot to do, because every gas station has an attached attraction of some sort, whether a giant car, a museum of garage junk, or an entire palace made of corn! I guess that's where I'll start, with the corn palace. It's not actually attached to a gas station, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

Corn Palace:

And yes, they have an official corn palace webcam.

My dad and me in front of the storm chasing vans:

Dad:

Early on in the trip, we saw this beautiful anvil cloud (aka Cumulonimbus Incus):

Storm:

Inside the van (that's Todd, our amazing tour leader):

One of the things that I found to be the most amazing about our trip was how much land there is that's completely untouched. You can drive for miles and miles without passing another car, without seeing a house or anything. Also, the highways are red! I don't know why, I'm sure it has something to do with the kinds of materials available, but it was really cool. Anyway, I'm sure my pictures won't do the Northern Plains any justice, but I hope you get some idea of how beautiful it is out there.

So much open land:

Beautiful clouds:

There were actually two giant supercells getting sucked into each other in this picture, and yes, it was really that pink!

My dad at a gas station attraction, this one had a giant green car!

Winding road:

I thought these flowers were really cool, the stems and leaves were almost blue:

I love this picture:

I don't know if you can see it, but there's an oil rig in the background of this next picture. I love oil rigs, I don't know why:

Murdo, South Dakota:

An experimental Dominos delivery car in a gas station junk museum:

Me taking a picture:

I couldn't help but wonder... whose mailboxes are these? There weren't any houses for miles:

Irrigation system at one of the many "corn or something else" fields:

They must really need it with land like this:

Well, this next one was a "something else" field if I ever saw one. We stumbled across a marijuana field on a little dirt farm road in Nebraska when we were pulling the vans over to use the satellites.

Yes, that's all marijuana:

Dave (one of the guys on our trip who just so happened to be wearing a Marijuana shirt that day) holding the cash crop of Nebraska:

Stoner Dad:

Now back to some more pretty pictures from the area:

If only back then I had the camera that I have now.... Oh well, I guess I'll just have to go back and do it all over again!

Watching a Red Cross vehicle heading towards a storm:

More clouds:

One ray of sunshine:

One night, we were chasing a huge storm somewhere in Nebraska, I believe, and using the in-van computers we followed it even at night when we could hardly see anything. We ended up turning onto a dirt road that led right into the center of a giant corn field. A giant corn field in Connecticut terms would be... well, probably non-existent, but in Nebraska those things are HUGE so we drove deeper and deeper into the field when we passed a little old graveyard, how weird is that? It was actually terrifying because it was literally a dark and stormy night with an ancient little graveyard. When we reached what must have been the direct center of this corn field, we discovered that while there were stars above us, we were surrounded 360 degrees by lightning storms. There was constant lightning, never a second without any, and the winds were whipping around us like nothing you'll ever see in New England. This is a picture of some tall grass in the headlights of one of our vans that sort of shows how bad the wind was:

I tried to get a picture of lightning, but it was so bright that it had some weird effect on the film (I was using film rather than digital for most of these pictures) and the light got refracted or something into a bunch of different colors onto the picture which is still pretty cool:

That night, we all woke up to a tornado siren going off which was definitely exciting. The next day, we finally saw our tornadoes, twenty-three of them (part of a 67 tornado storm). I spent most of my time video-taping rather than taking still pictures, so I don't have that many, but I'll put up what I have.

I wish we had a need for these in Connecticut, I really do:

Storm:

That's our other van, up by that soon-to-be tornado. This is when we decided we should probably back away a little:

This is actually one of my favorite pictures, although the small version on the computer doesn't do it any justice. If you look carefully, you can see the "corkscrew" tornado spiraling down to the ground right in the middle:

This tree got completely split apart:

We chased this storm from Nebraska all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, stopping at a number of places along the way to take pictures and videos.

Amazing supercell with a great wall cloud:

There's actually a tornado in this picture but it's really hard to see. It looks like a vertical white line in the direct center of the picture:

Video taping a tornado:

This is the edge of the supercell which was ENORMOUS by the way, I just didn't have enough room in my lens to get the whole thing in a picture. You can actually see bands going around the outside of it which were rotating the whole time:

Tornado:

We chased the storm to Sioux Falls, like I said:

The Brick Wall
(my favorite part of the story)

When we got there, it was nighttime and we couldn't see much of the storm anymore except for the lightning, so we stopped the van in another field to watch. The wind kept picking up until it was so strong that we couldn't even stand and everyone had to lean up against the van to protect themselves from the wind. I tried to walk out into the wind and nearly got knocked right over. No one was paying attention to any of the weather instruments because we were all too busy enjoying the strong winds when one of the members of our tour heard a tornado warning on the radio. Apparently, we were right in between two giant storms and needed to get to safety ASAP. We sped down the road looking for the nearest gas station, listening to the radio which was, at that point, reporting that there were multiple tornadoes right exactly where we were. You really don't want to be anywhere near tornadoes in the dark. Well, I do, but in general you shouldn't. We pulled into the only gas station, parked the vans under the little roof over the gas pumps, and ran inside to take cover. We looked around only to realize that three of the four walls of the gas station were entirely glass! I don't know how we didn't notice this, but the only thing we could do was run back outside and get up against the one brick wall and hope it would protect us. We got outside the building and Todd looked up at the sky and told us to run, so of course we did. We got up against the wall and watched a tree crash down in the parking lot right in front of us (I even caught it on video!) The metal street signs were bending backwards in the wind and looked like they would blow away any second. Lights were flickering, the wind was howling, and there was absolutely nothing we could do but wait. Another car came screeching down the road and pulled in right in front of us and asked if we knew what was going on. He said that there was another storm chasing group that had been a few minutes behind us and they hadn't made it in time and all the windows of their vans had blown in. We had no idea how close we were to disaster that night. We stood up against that wall for a completely unknown amount of time because I think we were all entranced by a combination of amazement and terror. It wasn't until the next morning over breakfast that Todd told us how much trouble we were really in. He said that he hadn't wanted to freak us all out, but that he was really thinking in his head Well, maybe the bricks will fall on all of us and someone will see a giant heap of rubble and dig us out in a few hours. We also analyzed the satellite data from the time period that we were at that gas station and saw a giant vortex pass over the gas station. We weren't actually in a tornado, but a rotating vortex did pass right over our heads which certainly made it feel like we were.

On our last day, we were all so happy to have been a part of something so amazing. I'm sure not everyone would see being trapped up against a brick wall in the biggest tornado outbreak in history as "amazing," but it was and I would do it again any day (and hopefully will!) The next few pictures are from the drive back to Denver before going home. We didn't see any storms, but we did get a beautiful sunset:

I can't wait to go back and definitely will. Sorry this was so long, I couldn't help it. If you're at all interested in this stuff, I hope you'll go to the Storm Chasing Adventure Tours website and check it out for yourself.

Also, I found a couple awesome links. This guy's website has a bunch of pictures from that same storm, and the picture of the group of people walking around the street looking at debris is actually our group:

Erig Nguyen's June 2003 Storm Site

This is a video I found of some of the tornadoes that day. The one at the end was an F4 that destroyed the entire town of Manchester, SD (click on the first picture on the left for the video):

Storm Video

Lastly, I found this site which is another guy's experience chasing the same storm. He has some cool pictures and satellite graphics:

South Dakota Tornado Outbreak

Well, that completes my very long (but actually very short compared to what I would have liked to have written!) storm chasing entry. Goodnight everyone!

Posted by lauren at March 7, 2007 10:07 PM

Comments

Posted by: brent at March 8, 2007 12:32 AM

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Posted by: G at March 13, 2007 11:16 AM