I don’t know what is more thrilling, when you intercept a tornado – or when one of your long-time friends and past tour guest intercepts a tornado. The latter happened today when I received a text message from Nicole saying there was a wicked storm in the Denver area and she was going to head out an “see what she could see”.

Overnight (June 7th, 2009) a rare atmospheric phenomenon occurred in south-central Oklahoma. No it wasn’t a tornado, it was much more rare than that – even during 2009! Suddenly at about 3am CDT in Jefferson County the air temperature became very hot and dry, the temperature shot up to 97 degrees F, literally within minutes. The event that happened is called a Convective Heat Burst, it happens when a parcel of very cold and unsaturated air within a dying storm descends very rapidly and warms due to compression (at a rate of 9.8C per 1,000 meters) and overshoots its equilibrium level and reaches the surface.

22:02Z 3D radar image from KCYS Cheyenne, WY Radar. Notice the yellow lines (precip) wrapping around the updraft. The image below was taken 8 minutes after this radar scan. The tornado was on the ground for over 20 minutes.

Spring-like weather has returned to the Central Plains, but it’s June – not May!

Conditions are finally becoming a bit more favorable across the High Plains for severe weather. However, the past few weeks have been extremely limited due to lack of flow, lack of moisture and you guessed it – lack of quality storms. We had been reduced to being extremely happy with rainbows lately – it’s not what we’re here for, but they still make a great photo!

So what do storm chasers do when the weather is horrible (that is sunny with a light breeze)? They drive around and take artsy photos of anything that they can pass the time with. I snapped a few shots of a wind turbine in NE Kansas last week and made this composite image from them.

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”.

Today’s severe outbreak is setting up. However tomorrow could be the bigger severe event in Oklahoma. It’s going to depend on what happens this evening and if there are outflow boundaries leftover from today’s storms.

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.

Oklahoma University and the National Weather Center cut the ceremonial ribbon on the first NWS quality Dual-Polarization radar this week.

There is a Moderate Risk for severe storms this morning spanning across much of the south as a major tornadic event is currently organizing into what appears will be a widespread event.

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.

A recent story by Associated Press writer Holbrook Mohr tells a familiar story – in …

The GFS is hinting on what could be a major event set to take place early next week in the Central Plains.

Whenever possible I always try to attend various launches from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and with no weather of notability happening in the plains – Renee and I decided to make a trip to the east coast and witness the launch of STS-119 from Titusville, FL.