Articles in the Gerneral Category
We started the day off in the southern portion of the Texas Panhandle and drove all day without much stopping to get back into Oklahoma. We witnessed convective initiation on the southern end of the boundary, just north of Watonga and stayed with this cell all evening long.
You know how you can tell when your tour customers are happy? They smile! And, these guys should be smiling after witnessing awe-inspiring storm structure in none other than the roadless Nebraska Sandhills on May 20th (Tour 4). Not too mention we just drove through that dark precip area in the background a few minutes before this was taken.
Tour 4 was a rough week for storms, we only had a single chase day – Wednesday May 20th. We intercepted a supercell near Hyannis, NE that is otherwise known as the “Mullin Storm”.
It seems that storm chasers and musicians pretty much live the same road life…
If there is a tornado, I sure hope someone has it covered! There were hundreds of storm chasers covering a severe thunderstorm on May 5th near Breckenridge, Texas. After all, it was the only storm in the entire state so there wasn’t a lot to choose from.
UPDATE: The Map Widget has been restored to full status.
It seems that something …
We thought it might be a good idea to create a special page on StormChase.com with a link to all the Spotter Network widget’s running around out there. So send us the link to the page where you’ve installed your widget and sometime in the near future, we’ll get that put together and update it once a month (or so).
Things are getting a bit punchy in Oklahoma at this hour. SPC issued a Mesoscale Discussion just a short time ago – Tornado Watch will likely follow shortly.
Over the past decade a lot of technological innovations has changed the way we chase storms. While I still consider ham radio communications to be an extremely important part of my chase rig for emergency communications, I no longer depend on my ICOM dual-band radio as much as I did just five storm seasons ago.
Oklahoma University and the National Weather Center cut the ceremonial ribbon on the first NWS quality Dual-Polarization radar this week.
The map widget is an overwhelming success. In the past month it has averaged 4 new users per day. That may not sound like a huge number, but considering the number of chasers/spotters out there and those who are using SN – we’re thrilled with those results. We obviously don’t want to create projects that people don’t like and a lot of people have written in with their appreciation for the widget as well as their recommendations for improvement.
Tornado watches are currently in effect from Louisiana to the east coast of Florida and tornado warnings are lighting up the map across the gulf states.
The DOD recently revealed a new vehicle specifically designed for use in the harsh war-torn environment in Afghanistan, but maybe someday there will be some hope that these vehicles can be acquired for use by private citizens, just as the original Hummer was. Why? Because it would be the perfect vehicle to hunt down nature’s most violent storms.
I thought I would put some humor on here and recently re-edited this video. This occurred during Tour 2 in 2007, which is still by far one of the most memorable tours that we’ve conducted. Not only was it memorable because of Dr. Tom allowing us to take a Bic Razor and chop his hair off (yeah – that was funny!), but we saw 12 tornadoes during the week across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
