Well, this year's chase trip is in the books - or blog as it may be - and our lives will now resume their normal flow. The car has been dropped off, 8600 driven miles was the finally tally, and I am home relaxing before I sleep for the rest of the day. This trip was definitely one that stands out over the past 4 years I have been chasing. As a team, I think we have come a long way in our forecasting and planning; most every target location was correct, the storms we intercepted were consistently the best of the day, and when something did happen we were ready. The tornado we saw in southeast Colorado will be hard to top in this lifetime, and I can honestly say that it was the most awesome event I have ever watched. Coupled with a couple of the beautifully structured cells we witnessed, this year was an undeniable success.

I would like to thank Chris and Neil and Greg again for lending their meteorological knowledge and expertise, Nate for letting us crash at his place in Kansas City at the end of the trip, and to all of the people who have followed the blog and seemed truly interested in our endeavors.

Until next year...

Neil and I are on our way back to the DC area now. ETA for home is about 8:30am tomorrow. Looks like clear skies most of the way, so that's a plus.

Back in Kansas City, the trip is done for this year. Short story, we ended up not seeing any storms the past couple days except for late linear and marginal convection. We chased around a little but there wasn't much to see. Tomorrow Neil and I start the drive back to NoVA / Maryland area.

Another day, another coffee shop. Waiting in Hastings, Nebraska, for things to fire off. Our best bet is if something can develop out here near central and western Nebraska / Kansas state line and move a little east into the lower LCL's. Thea shear and CAPE are decent out here so we are definitely going to get a nice super-cell. IF something develops.

UPDATE: In Hiawatha, Kansas, now. Ended up driving almost to Kansas City, and then turned back west some. Tornado warned cells to our east on into Missouri, but horrible chase territory out there. Still a crap-shoot.

Today did not, in fact, live up to it's potential. We got a couple early discreet cells, but they never really amounted to much and even as tornado warned cells they were mostly just a disorganized line segment that looked like a gust front.

The bright note of today was supper. Went to the Blarney Stone restaurant in O'Neill, Nebraska, and it was by far the best food we have eaten on this trip. Too bad we didn't have time to sit and enjoy a couple pints of Guinness.

Headed now to Grand Island, Nebraska, for the night; chase target looks to be central and north Kansas tomorrow.

Long night and day of driving, but we are camped out now in Ainsworth, Nebraska, waiting for initiation. Looks like we will be heading north towards Winner, South Dakota, eventually but we don't want to get too far north just yet. Also, it looks like SPC is about to issue a watch for our area, so hopefully today will get exciting.

Nearly 900 miles and 34 hours later, we've returned to Kearney, NE by way of Boise City, OK...I'm getting too old for this.

Hoping for supercells near the dryline/warm front intersection in southern South Dakota tomorrow, initial target is Winner, SD.

Goodnight.

Nothing happened in the panhandle / New Mexico except some crapvection and line segments. On our way back towards South Dakota now. Sigh.

Camped out at Dairy Queen (remarkably our first of the trip) in Boise City, Oklahoma. The AC is broke, and it is hot in here. It's also hot outside, so no good options. Hopefully a storm will develop soon so we can get back in the car.

Also, looks like tomorrows target is South Dakota again, so tonight we drive back up through Kansas and Nebraska...

Sitting in Dodge City, KS. Got some of my pictures into Josh's photo gallery. In the meantime, I've heard Chris tediously hammering away at the keyboard over here in typing what I think is a blog post.. sounds like it could be several chapters long ;)

Baca County Beast Reflections...

Good evening ladies and gentlemen...

Currently sitting in our quite luxurious accommodation at the La Quinta Inn and Suites in Dodge City, Kansas where I'm composing my first ever (and hopefully long-awaited) blog entry. We're heading to NE NM/SE CO/W OK Panhandle tomorrow. Marginal setups are usually maximized in favored upslope regions (as we saw yesterday!), so we feel this corridor will have the greatest chance of supercells and perhaps a cheap tornado.

Shifting gears back to yesterday's display of atmospheric perfection, violence, and overall grandeur, I remain in absolute awe of what we witnessed. A book purchased for me by my father, Steven F. Hovanic once stated that 2% of the world's population will see a tornado in their lifetime; one has to wonder how much more the percentage would decrease if you changed the stipulations to "how many people will see a large violent tornado from close range in their lifetime?" You would have to feel the percentage would drop exponentially.

Pausing to reflect further on yesterday's events, the sheer shock and surprise of when/how the tornado developed make the results that much more incredible:

1) We had been chasing the storm for nearly 5 hours before the large/violent tornado developed. Within the first 2 hours of the storms lifecycle, it obtained significant organization and looked a threat to produce tornadoes frequently, during this period the storm produced 2 fairly brief tornadoes.

2) The storm then proceeded to wrap its low-level mesocyclone in rain and become a 'high-precipitation' supercell. Often times, once this occurs, visibility of the "bear's cage" (the area where tornadoes form within a supercell) becomes obscured, except for those daring souls who wish to place themselves in the path of any possible tornado, or those brave souls who have no qualms battling massive hail stones which may be very close to the tornado. As a result, the best time for easily/safely observing the storm is done, and the remainder of the chase often becomes a frustrating "what can we see looking through the rain/hail?" type of event.

3) Continuing on from #2 above, the remarkable thing about yesterday's "Baca County Beast" was its ability to continually develop a new low-level mesocyclone to the south/southwest, thereby keeping the new mesocyclone precipitation free for a long duration of time. That being said, after the first two hours of the storm's lifecycle, it seemed to grow increasingly high-based, despite continuing to exhibit very rapid rotation. This will make producing tornadoes for the storm much more difficult as the cloud base physically increases in distance from the ground. Anyhow, for reasons that will be discussed in a future blog post aimed toward the technical crowd, the supercell almost instantaneously decided it would begin to lower its cloud base as it reached far SE Colorado and begin producing monstrous tornadoes.

After observing at least 50 or 60 high-precipitation supercells in my storm chase career, this was the first time I've EVER seen a storm "come out" of its extremely high precipitation phase (where it likely had a very cold Rear-Flank Downdraft) and begin producing visible/high-contrast tornadoes again. This blog post has become long-winded enough, so I'll stop here.

Regards,
Chris Hovanic

Heading into south-east Nebraska now, was not our intention to be this far east as of last night but after looking at the surface map this morning the triple point is farther east than was expected. On the up side this puts us in a better environment for super-cell development.

The Videos were done with a digital camera, came out far better than I thought it would. I don't post much on the blog, Josh does an amazing job of keeping it up and is much better with words than I am. But I did want to mention that this Tornado was one I have been waiting for my entire life. Just everything was amazing about it. We almost left it but the guys did a great job of being patient with it and staying on it. A truly remarkable tornado and scenery.

Second video from today:

Video from today coming online..

Awesome chase. The best day I've had in my five short years of chasing. On what was, at best, a marginal day like Josh said we see the best tornado any of us has ever seen. And, more importantly, the town of Campo, CO was spared and we saw no major damage as we drove back north to get to Goodland, KS for tonight.

This morning it looked possible that we might not even see a supercell as there was no real shear to be had. To make matters worse, convection was projected to fire off later in the afternoon when higher temps would be in place in combination with mid 50s dewpoints, which would yield much higher LCLs and higher based storms making it hard for anything to produce a tornado. As luck would have it though our storm fired off early enough when temps were still lower and sustained itself long enough to favorably intersect an outflow boundary and go crazy. So much for the Storm Prediction Center's 2% tornado probabilities for today ;) Going to try and put up some pics that I took in a bit.