Storm Chasing

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Drew99GT

Joined
Oct 11, 2002
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Colorado Springs
Is there any storm chasers here? I'm freakin addicted to it! Went out the last two days, and now my car has 1,000 more miles. No tornado touchdowns (several mesocyclonic wall clouds that breifly formed micro funnels), but I found out that 2 inch hail will not dent a Toyota Corolla at all
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Actually, I saw a couple gustnadoes, which were completly misinterpereted by all the loons out there. There's like a gigantic dust devil on the outflow of a high base storm and the various ham/radio channels were lit up with people yelling "TORNADO"
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Anyway, it's the best free (except gas/food/boredom at times) excitement I know of.
 
I am, but live in NJ so I don't see anything. I love that stuff. I want to go out their someday and do that. Do you have any cool photos you could post? How common are tornados out their where you can actually go out and look for them? Amazes me....Drew did you see the movie Twister?
 
Tornadic thunderstorms are VERY common on the high plains of Colorado. The sweet thing is that Kansas/Texas/Nebraska/Oklahoma are very close. The good kind of isolated super cell thunderstorms that produce long lived tornados usually form east of CO. The thing about them is you have to be in a target area where inititation of storms will occur before they do. Tornadoes usually happen in the beginning to middle stages of a thunderstorm, so most of them last under 5 minutes.

Check out these sites for vids/pics:

2004 Atticka Kansas

Storm video

Stormgasm

Tornado Vids

Colorado Storm footage

I witnessed 3 of those tornados in Elbert county last year.

Also, check out the chaser's forum for reports for your area etc. If ANYTHING is going down in your area, these guys will know and plenty of info about potential target areas will be posted.
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I think everytime I have gone through Altus, Oklahoma, a toronado had just been there or was there after I went through. One place I put on my list of not where I would retire.

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Originally posted by 59 Vetteman:
I think everytime I have gone through Altus, Oklahoma, a toronado had just been there or was there after I went through. One place I put on my list of not where I would retire.

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I saw a show on the History Channel about tornadoes and they said there was a town in Kansas that got destroyed on the exact same date 3 consecutive years in a row. Now why doesn't that happen in Pyung Yang!
 
Ahhhhhhhh Vetteman, it's not that BAD! You just got to know which way that mother is heading and drive 180 away from it. Yeah right, that's what we all say. I tell you one thing, I got caught smack dab in the middle of the May 3rd tornado living in Chickasha, and I tell you what, if your not religious, you would have been in no time flat. That story you hear about people saying it sounds like a locomotive train coming at you is dead on. You hear it and you also FEEL it. I'm talking hairs on your arm standing straight up. Yeah, there cool to look at, 100 miles AWAY!!! I'd rather just look at pictures now. I've lived through two super typhoons while on Guam, but a tornado is the winner, hands down.
 
If you guys want to do it and have a good shot at seeing some violent weather, sign up for a storm chasing tour. Some of them are pretty darn expensive (like 3 grand expensive
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), but others are much cheaper. The guys that operate the tours have satelite internet and they're all usually meteorologists with expertise in forcasting within a tight radius exactly when and where supercell thunderstorms will form. You just have to hit a date when the weather trends are looking good (southern jetstream!). I personally think supercel storms are the most beautiful part of nature. The coolest thing is to watch a tower form and spin up a mesycyclone within 20 minutes because you can feel the instability in the air. Like when a cold front pushes through hot humid air, you can just feel it and the storms build up from clear blue sky almost instantly and the change in how the air feels is like night and day. It just feels electrifying!
 
quote:
Originally posted by Schmoe:
Ahhhhhhhh Vetteman, it's not that BAD! You just got to know which way that mother is heading and drive 180 away from it. Yeah right, that's what we all say. I tell you one thing, I got caught smack dab in the middle of the May 3rd tornado living in Chickasha, and I tell you what, if your not religious, you would have been in no time flat. That story you hear about people saying it sounds like a locomotive train coming at you is dead on. You hear it and you also FEEL it. I'm talking hairs on your arm standing straight up. Yeah, there cool to look at, 100 miles AWAY!!! I'd rather just look at pictures now. I've lived through two super typhoons while on Guam, but a tornado is the winner, hands down.
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Schmoe, did you actually witness the Chikasha tornado? WOW! That was the most violent tornado ever captured on video and measured with radar.
 
Not only witnessed that one, but saw about 5 more that were born from that cell. It basically went up I-44. Cell started around north of Lawton, and then went up the interstate and dropped about a couple of dozen more. My wife had passed the bridge where two people died about 1 minute before. They got caught in the tornado then ditched the car and decided to crawl up into a bridge truss. I think one survived but the others got sucked out of it. It wiped out the Chickasha airport, which had a couple of WWII type hangars. Pretty scarry stuff.
 
Being that I love severe weather, I'd say your lucky to have witnessed May 3, 1999. But never in my wildest fantasies would I want an F5 tornado to strike such a large metro area (heck, any occupied structure for that matter). It's kind of a bitter sweet fantasy I have; it's so fascinating and spectacular, yet so dangerous and destructive. Seems stupid/arrogent and selfish to actually wish for severe weather just to feed my fancy, but I do.
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YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Caught a breif tornado touch down yesterday in southeast CO. WOW, what a perfect storm. Actual condensation funnel lasted about 2 minutes, but the updraft/mesocyclone continued rotating very quickly, then it became a rain/hail dumper. Unfortunetally, a guy in the caravan I was traveling with hit a deer
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I went out yesterday in eastern Colorado; 11 reported tornado touchdowns but you had to practically be in them to see them. Way way to rain rapped and the reports of 5 inch hail prompted me to be a bit more cautious. Oh well, it was a success because I met the absolute coolest old guy I think I've ever met in Burlington CO. I parked in an old abandoned RV park off the highway to see what the day had in store and a new Cummins Ram pulled up. Guy asked if I was tired from driving; I explained what I was doing so we started chit chatting. Hed was the owner of the RV park. Turns out his son is an accountant like myself; he's in Denver. He gave me his number for a job hookup etc. and to give me info about grad school. We talked politics, cars, MOTOR OIL! for about an hour and a half. He had a Phillips 66 shirt on; he used to own a Phillips station there at the RV park. We shook hands and exchanged numbers and about 5 minutes later, he returned with a whole bunch of baby Snickers bars for me and a ice cold pop! Truely the most genuine human being I ever met. He was pretty lonely it seemed as he was explaining some family difficulties he's having, I won't relay them. But everytime I'm out that way, I'm gonna stop in and have a cup of coffe with Forrest!
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Cool story. Won't find to many of those happy people here in NJ. Are Tornados that common in Eastern Colorado? Where exactly are Tornado's most common in the US, more specifically, which states? I thought Texas/Oklahoma get the most.
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Oklahoma I'd say has the highest number of Tornadoes in relation to the geographical size. Texas by far has the actual highest number of tornados. Then Kansas, then Nebraska. Eastern CO, because of the oragraphic lifting that occurs along the high plains, is very succeptable to tornados. There is an old/extinct mountain range called the palmer divide just north of CO Springs that extends east **** near to the Kansa border; this geographic feature does amazing things for severe thunderstorms in my area. Buster, if your ever out this way in April through June, look me up. I'll get you in some nice severe weather and hopefully a tornado or two. This year has just been lousy. Record setting lack of severe weather, and when it does occur, the storms are just way to hail intensive and rain wrapped. The storms seem to become so tightly wrapped that the outflow of the storms wraps around the updraft and obscurs any chance of seeing the tornado.
 
Drew. I live out in Limon. WHere were you last night! We had 8 in the area. Scanner was going berzerk! THey even had to put the abulance crew out on stand by and turned on the town sirens but it picked up before it got the the Denny's on the west side of town....


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June 6, 1990

A strong (F3) tornado tore through Limon, Colorado. 228 of the town's homes and trailers were either damaged or destroyed and nearly 80 percent of the central business district was wiped out. Hail up to 2.5 inches in diameter damaged the roofs of over 90 percent of the houses of Limon.
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[ June 03, 2005, 10:56 PM: Message edited by: Starbreaker666 ]
 
I was right there!!!!!!! I even stopped and talked to an ambulance crew that was spotting on the road that goes to Hugo. Yea, man the scanner was lit up. At one point, after that 1st huge supercell went through and everything just blew up, they were indicating two possible tornadoes near limon, one 3 miles southeast and one 12 miles south of limon. I videotaped the mesocyclone form 12 miles south of limon and after reviewing the vid, there were several very small brief funnels that condensed out.

I remember that night of the 1990 Limon tornado vividly. I remember my family and I standing on our deck looking at the cumulonimbus tower east of CO Springs. HOLY ****!!!!!!!!! That was the most impressive, tallest thunderhead I've ever seen. The NWS said the top of it got to around 90,000 feet. Most big supercelss average 50,000 to 60,000 feet. Starbreaker, did you see the size of the hail north of Limon? I picked up a 4 inch hailstone and stuck it in my cooler. It's in my freezer. It probably melted to 4 inch; started out as a grapefruit
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