This summer of 2010 has been the warmest summer in West Michigan since 1955, according to WOOD TV meteorologist Bill Steffen. Temperatures in the 90s have predominated, with dewpoints in the upper 70s,  and Lake Michigan water temps–in the mid 70s this morning–have been as high as 80 degrees. That’s like swimming in bathwater, and I’m not even referring to the lake–I’m talking about just stepping outdoors.

We made it as high as 93 degrees yesterday, and it looks like hot temperatures are going to hang around for a few more days until a weak cold front modifies things a bit and hopefully brings a few storms to make life interesting. I’m all for hot and sticky under the right circumstances, but a glance at RAOB model soundings for RUC and NAM shows utterly placid conditions. Winds at 500 millibars are doddering along at a geriatric 10-15 knots, and the rest of the atmosphere is keeping pretty much the same pace.

The great storms of May and June are so far past that they seem like ancient history. Who all besides me is ready for a nice, deep trough to come sweeping across our area? Patience, patience, lads and lasses. The fall season is coming. This stifling heat and humidity will soon get stirred up with episodes of cooler air sweeping in from Canada, and the weather machine will kick into gear once again. Then we can all fire up our laptops and Rain-X our windshields for one last blast before the snows fly.

Now is the time of year when waterspouts start putting in an appearance on the Great Lakes. I had largely forgotten about spouts until a few days ago when my friend and fellow weather weenie Mike Kovalchick mentioned them in an email. Bing! A light blinked on in my head: That’s right! Waterspouts!

I’ve never seen a waterspout. But then, until last year about this time with my buddy Kurt Hulst, I’d never made a point of going out after them. Kurt and I busted that day, but maybe this year I’ll get lucky, provided I increase my chances by taking more opportunities to chase spouts.

I have zero experience forecasting waterspouts. Thankfully, there’s a snappy little graph called the Waterspout Nomogram that simplifies the process. Developed by Wade Szilagyi of the Meteorological Service of Canada, the Waterspout Nomogram provides a quick visual aid for determining when certain critical parameters are in place for four different classifications of waterspout: tornadic, upper low, land breeze, and winter.

The tornadic variety is self-explanatory, and any storm chaser with some experience making his or her own forecasts should have a good feel for when that kind of waterspout is likely. Mike favors the 500 mb cold-core, closed low setup, which to my thinking may be a variant of the first in producing low-top supercells. The remaining two, land breeze and winter, seem to involve different dynamics. For all the waterspout categories, one of the constraints is that for spouts to occur, winds at 850 mbs have to be less than 40 knots, something I find particularly interesting in the case of supercell-based waterspouts.

In any event, I’m hoping that this year is my year to finally witness a spout or two. Michigan chasers and weather weenies, it’s time to pay attention to the marine forecasts. The “second season” can include action right along the lakeshore even when nothing’s popping anywhere else. Make sure you bring your shotgun just in case a waterspout gets too close for comfort (written with a wink and a grin).

Sorry–I seem to have let an entire week slip by without posting. Many bloggers have a knack for slapping out short, cogent posts in 15 minutes or so, but that’s not a gift of mine. Just about every post takes several hour to write, particularly the ones that include musical exercises. So when I have other things packing my schedule, the prospect of sitting down and creating a post can seem daunting.

That has been the case this week. Could be a streak of just plain old laziness somewhere in the mix, too, but mainly, these past few days have been busy ones. My brothers Pat and Terry arrived for a two-week visit Monday, so family has been a priority. And work still goes on, regardless–gotta make a living.

Today my bros, my sister, Diane, and I headed to Newaygo, rented some kayaks, plopped them into the Muskegon River, and spent the afternoon taking a delightful 6-mile drift with the current. The Muskegon is a surpassingly beautiful stretch of water. I saw three bald eagles soaring overhead, slews of large turtles sunning themselves on logs, several kingfishers, a green heron, and brilliant red cardinal flowers rimming the banks in swampy areas. Altogether it was a most satisfying day.

But of course, as I said, I haven’t had time to write. So I figured that instead, I’d refer you to a couple of links to archived articles. The first is one I wrote one year ago, titled “Will I Ever Become a Good Jazz Improviser?” The second article is for storm chasers by guest poster Andrew Revering of Convective Development, Inc., on how to forecast severe weather during northwest flow.

I hope you enjoy the articles, and will find your journey back to last August’s posts profitable and refreshing. As for me, I’m tired. It has been a long day, it’s now after midnight, and I’m going to bed. G’night!

I haven’t seen a storm like last night’s storm in Michigan in a long, long time. Man, what a beauty!

Non-stop lightning, much of it appearing to be positive strokes that lasted for seconds at a time, along with a veritable feast of anvil crawlers, made for a photographic smorgasbord. Plus, the storm structure–as much of it as I could make out at night, illuminated by the incessant lightning–was truly impressive. If only the storm had arrived an hour earlier, when there was enough light to really see the thing!

I had just finished doing a couple of interviews down in Dunlap, Indiana, for the book I’m writing on the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes. My meetings required me to forgo chasing a supercell that moved through the Battle Creek area as the warm front lifted northward, and I was curious to find out what had happened with it. Pulling into a parking lot, I fired up my computer, opened GR3, and gaped. A line of supercells was advancing across Lake Michigan from Wisconsin. The first one in the line looked great–SRV showed definite rotation–and, headed on an ESE trajectory, the storm was poised to make landfall around Saugatuck. Winds there were almost straight easterly, and they were beautifully backed across most of lower Michigan. Hmmm…what did the VAD wind profile look like at Grand Rapids? Dang, sweet! How the heck did that kind of setup wind up in Michigan?

The storms weren’t moving terribly fast, around 25 knots. Could I make it in time? I was bloody well going to try. There was no denying the rush of adrenaline now galvanizing me, thrusting me into chase mode. I hit US 20 and headed west past South Bend, where the highway merged into US 31 north.

I still had a good 40 miles to go by the time I connected with I-196 near Benton Harbor. I wasn’t sure whether I’d catch the storm by the time it made landfall. Maybe I’d be better off playing more to the east. But I decided to take my chances, and that turned out to be the right move. I couldn’t have timed it better.

As I approached M-89, the eastern part of the storm had made landfall, but the radar showed the rotation still out over Lake Michigan. It wouldn’t be there for long, though, and, having shifted its trajectory south of Douglas, it was now heading straight at me.

Bingo! This was exactly what I’d been hoping for. Leaving the Interstate, I headed east along M-89 and found a nice, open field a mile down the road, just west of 66th Street, 4 miles south of Douglas and 4 miles west of Fennville. Then, turning my car around to face the incoming storm, I parked and grabbed my camera out of the back seat.

The lightning in this beast requires superlatives to describe it. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of high-voltage CGs, delivered with the unbridled, over-the-top enthusiasm of a 4th of July fireworks finale and accompanied by the incessant grumbling of thunder. There were times, as the lightning cells moved past me and surrounded me, when I felt like I was sitting inside an immense flashbulb–a flashbulb that kept firing again, and again, and again. Oh, man, what an extravaganza of pure, searing power and beauty! I’ve done my best to capture it, but my skills as a lightning photographer fall far short of what this storm had to offer. Now, my buddy Kurt Hulst, he’s Da Man when it comes to getting fantastic lightning shots, and I know he got some last night. Me, I seem to have a problem getting a good, crisp focus at night, but I try.

By and by, the flickerings began to illuminate a cloud feature I’d been looking for: a hint of a beavertail off to my northwest. It’s location confirmed what the radar was telling me: the storm’s mesocyclone was moving straight at me. I was in a perfect location–and all this time, standing out in the field near my car, I had yet to feel so much as a drop of rain.

The mosquitoes were thick and nasty, and I was getting eaten alive, but viewing at my position was excellent. Farther east, I’d be getting into thick woods, and since the storm wasn’t exactly rocketing along, I stayed put until the meso got too close for me to be able to distinguish its features. Then I moseyed east a few miles.

I parked again for a few minutes at 63rd Street and noted that what had begun as a stubby beavertail had rapidly grown into an enormous inflow stinger. To my northwest, I could see what appeared to be a large, low wall cloud–hard to determine exactly what it was or what it was doing at night, but it looked convincing enough that I called it in to KGRR.

I tracked just ahead of this storm all the way to Plainwell. M-89 proved to be a perfect route, angling southeast along roughly the same path that the storm was taking. On the outskirts of Allegan, I stopped long enough to grab a few radar images. On this page, you can see a nice vault on the base reflectivity, and pronounced rotation on the storm relative velocity. (The circle just southeast of the town center marks my location. Ignore the marker with my name farther to the southwest on SRV; it’s old, an archive from when I dropped off of Spotter Network.)

A little farther down the road, I pulled aside again where a large, open stretch afforded good viewing. The mesocyclone was clearly visible, with a formidable-looking flange on the north side, nice striations, and an impressive inflow band circling in overhead. I hung out at that location until the lightning drew too close for comfort, then hopped back into my car and continued east.

At Plainwell, I dropped south on US 131 past the Kalamazoo exit, caught M-43 west for a mile or so, then parked in a parking lot and let the storm’s southernmost edge blow past me. The storm was still tornado-warned, but the radar indicated that it was weakening–cloud tops lower, VIL not as robust. North of me, just on the other side of M-43, a sheet of rain cascaded out of the wind-blown darkness into the luminous orange domain of the street lamps. Within half a minute, it was upon me, and for a short while, I sat and enjoyed the blast of downdraft and deluge. The rain that I had managed to elude all night had finally caught up with me.

Finally, as the storm bowed out on its journey eastward, I drove back to US 131 and headed for home. I stopped again for a while at the Martin exit, long enough to see what would become of another supercell that was moving inland from the Lake. It, too, quickly bowed out, but, in keeping with the tone of the day, it lit the after-midnight sky with a bombardment of lightning.

It was good to finally pull into my parking lot, climb the stairs to my apartment, and step inside. It had been one heck of a day, and I was ready to call it a good one and hit the sack.

As nasty a storm as it was, why didn’t the Allegan County supercell drop tornadoes? The storm earlier in the afternoon had produced at least one tornado near the Battle Creek airport; why not this one too? After all, it and its compatriots had peppered Wisconsin with tornadoes prior to crossing the Lake and heading for West Michigan. All I can surmise is, CAPE was an issue. Winds certainly appeared favorable for tornadoes, and F5 mesoanalysis indicated 1 km helicities ranging from 150-250 across the area as late as 1:00 a.m. The RUC model sounding for KGRR maybe overdoes helicity, but it’s interesting to see what it says about instability. All I can think is that daytime CAPE–whatever it may have been; I never took the time to find out–petered out after sundown, and the shear alone wasn’t enough to spin up tornadoes. That’s my guess as a non-meteorologist, and I’m ready to get other insights and opinions from more knowledgeable heads than mine.

Whatever the case, last night’s was one heckuva storm, and the kind of chase I don’t get to enjoy too often in Michigan. It was nice to finally get such a great opportunity.

It’s July 4, Independence Day. Happy Birthday, America! For all the problems that face you, you’re still the best in so many, many ways. One of those ways, which may seem trite to anyone but a storm chaser, is your spring weather, which draws chasers like a powerful lodestone not only from the all over the country, but also from the four corners of the world.

This has been an incredible spring stormwise, but its zenith appears to have finally passed for everywhere but the northern plains. And right now, even those don’t look particularly promising. That’s okay. I think that even the most hardcore chasers have gotten their fill this year and are pleased to set aside their laptops and break out their barbecue grills.

Now is the time for Great Lakes chasers to set their sights on the kind of weather our region specializes in, which is to say, pop-up thunderstorms and squall lines. The former are pretty and entertaining. The latter can be particularly dramatic when viewed from the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, sweeping in across the water like immense, dark frowns on the edge of a cold front. If you enjoy lightning photography, the lakeshore is a splendid place to get dramatic and unobstructed shots. Not that I can speak with great authority, since so far my own lightning pictures haven’t been all that spectacular. But that’s the fault of the photographer, not the storms.

The images on this page are from previous years. So far this year I’ve been occupied mainly with supercells and tornadoes, but I’m ready to make the shift to more garden variety storms, which may not pack the same adrenaline punch but lack for nothing in beauty and drama.

July 4th is a date that cold fronts seem to write into their planners. I’ve seen a good number of fireworks displays in West Michigan get trounced by a glowering arcus cloud moving in over the festivities. But tonight looks promising for Independence Day events. Storms are on the way, but they should hold off till well after the party’s over.  That means we’ll get two shows–the traditional pyrotechnics with all the boom, pop, and glittering, multicolored flowers filling the sky; and later, an electrical extravaganza, courtesy of a weak cold front. A Fourth of July double-header: what could be finer than that?

Yesterday I made my first dollar ever as a street musician. It wasn’t a conscious effort. I’ve never busked in my life, and if I were to take up busking as a serious practice, I wouldn’t choose the place I was at. For that matter, the term “street musician” doesn’t at all capture the essence of either my location or my activity.

I was out on the Paul Henry Thornapple Trail in Middleville, one of my favorite outdoor spots to practice my saxophone. The Paul Henry is an old railroad bed that has been converted to a paved hiking trail. It winds through an area of considerable natural beauty, blessed with an impressive diversity of habitats and a commensurately large variety of wild birds.  Along the south side of the trail, the lovely Thornapple River flows serenely by. To the north, an ancient millpond serves as a haven for sandhill cranes, great blue herons, mute swans, and other waterfowl. Red-headed woodpeckers flit among the trees, and farther down, where the open marsh grades into a hardwood swamp, cardinal flowers punctuate the shade-dappled trailside with exclamations of crimson.

I love to take my sax out to the trail, out to the bridge over the short channel connecting the Thornapple River to the millpond, and practice my horn. I was doing so yesterday evening, hammering out some material in the keys of Eb and F#, when a red-headed woodpecker flew up and perched on the trunk of a small tree not fifteen feet away. It was a striking bird, with black wings and upper body, a white breast, and a shocking red head–a sight rarely seen in these parts but one you can’t miss when it’s in front of you. However, not being a seasoned bird watcher, I wasn’t quite certain it was a woodpecker.

So when an elderly couple came strolling along the trail, I addressed them. “Did you see the bird that flew into that tree?” I asked. “It’s got a bright red head. I think it’s a red-headed woodpecker.  Do you know your birds? Maybe you can tell me.”

The man said no, he didn’t know what kind of bird it was, but he wanted to give me something. He unfolded a dollar bill that he had in his hand and handed it to me. “We’ve been listening to you down the trail,” he said with a smile.

I laughed and accepted the dollar bill from him. “Thanks!” I replied. “I think I’ll frame it. That’s the first dollar I’ve ever made as a busker–and I’m not even busking!”

The three of us talked for a while about the woodpeckers, and music, and the beauty of the trail. Then the couple went their way and I pocketed the dollar and returned to my practicing.

One of the rewards of practicing outdoors is the variety. You never know what you’ll see or whom you’ll meet.

And with that thought, it’s time to end this post and go practice my horn. See you in July.

We were close to the tornado, roughly a quarter mile south of it, paralleling it as it tore an eastward course through the Illinois fields. Dirt and shredded corn swirled around its base like an aura. As Kurt Hulst and I  pulled aside and stepped out of the car to take pictures, we could hear the roar. It wasn’t loud, just audible and big, very big, an intensely focused sound like an immense blowtorch or a rocket engine. Yet, close as Kurt and I were to the tornado, we were out of its path and beyond the range of any apparent debris, and I sensed no particular danger.

A brief staccato of blue flashes suddenly lit up the base of the funnel, accompanied by a loud bang, and chunks of debris flew skyward and centrifuged out. The tornado had hit a structure out in the field, most likely an outbuilding of some kind.

Fortunately, there was little real harm the twister could do out there in the broad Illinois prairie. Not yet, anyway. But a little way to the east lay Yates City, and two-and-a-half miles farther, the community of Elmwood…

The day had started off rather inauspiciously, with the previous evening’s aggressive SPC outlook degrading into a forecast for straight-line winds. The 12Z NAM, too, looked unpromising, and the RUC corroborated it, with mostly southwesterly surface winds veering with height to a unidirectional, westerly mid- and upper-level flow. A persistent batch of cloud cover from a mesoscale convective system threatened to minimize daytime heating and instability. In a word, the setup wasn’t one that suggested tornadoes.

But with a trough digging in from the west, rich moisture, great shear, and at least a semblance of clearing moving in from the southwest, Kurt and I decided to chance it anyway. Our friend and fellow Michigan chaser Ben Holcomb had alerted us the previous evening to the evolving weather situation, and after reading Friday night’s Day 2 Convective Outlook and scanning the NAM, which showed an impressive juxtaposition of the right ingredients, including high helicities stretching along I-80 from Iowa into Indiana, we knew that we had to go.

So off we headed for Illinois late Saturday morning. As Kurt pointed out, the forecast models don’t always have a good grasp on things. One thing we could tell from both the NAM and RUC, though, was that the best parameters now lay well south of I-80. Accordingly, we set our sights on Galesburg, and once there, we continued on, crossing the river at Burlington and heading west into Iowa.

I took a dewpoint reading of over 72 degrees on my Kestrel at New London. The air was juicy. But the clearing we had driven through in western Illinois was giving way to a an extensive mid-level cloud deck. Rather than continuing to forge farther west toward the cold front, we decided to backpedal eastward in the hope that convection would fire near the edge of the cloud shield. This idea became a moot point as the cloud cover rapidly expanded across the river into Illinois.  But better parameters still lay in our area. We were presently in an area of maximum sigtors and optimal 1 km helicity, and on the radar, a scattering of blue popcorn echoes suggested that localized convection was trying to get started. Anticipating that these features would all translate to the east, we drifted back in that direction.

We soon noticed a cloud base with a tower reaching up toward the higher cloud deck. It showed on the radar, as did another stronger one directly down the road from us. As we headed toward it, the second echo progressed from yellow to red. Not far to our northeast, we could see a rain curtain. Skirting it, we moved east of the developing storm cell, parked, and got our first good look at it.

The cell was organizing nicely and was already showing supercellular characteristics–nice separation of the  saucer-like updraft base from the precipitation core; a strong, crisp, tilted updraft tower; the first signs of banding, and a hint of an inflow stinger. Positioned on the southeast edge of the convective cluster in southeast Iowa, it was in a favorable position to ingest moist inflow unimpeded by other storms as it drifted at 30 knots toward Illinois.

This was our storm. We tracked with it back across the river, watching it develop, watching the base lower and the first hint of a wall cloud blossom and put on muscle, watching it tighten as the RFD notch wrapped around it.

Just southeast of  Maquon, Illinois, we saw it: a cloud of dust billowing up from the ground with brief, streaming tendrils of condensation forming and dissipating above it. Tornado! It was a brief appearance of maybe a minute’s duration, but the storm was just getting started, mustering energy for the next round.

We didn’t have long to wait. A minute or two later, as we proceeded down CR 8, a slender elephant’s trunk of a funnel probed its way earthward, intensified, and began gobbling its way through the corn, closing in to within a quarter-mile of us before turning straight east.

This turned out to be a beautiful, highly photogenic tornado, all the moreso for the amazing display of lightning that accompanied it. Kurt took some great video of it which will give you a much better appreciation for how electrified the tornadic environment was. At one point, at the 8:50 mark, you can see a bolt shoot directly from the funnel to the ground. I didn’t have the good fortune to witness the famed Mulvane, Kansas, tornado, but I’ve got to believe that this storm was similar in terms of its incessant lightning.

The funnel morphed through a variety of elegant formations, and the overall storm structure was beautiful. It was a stunning and mesmerizing sight, but with growing concern, Kurt and I realized that it was making its way toward Yates City and didn’t show any sign of weakening.

Fortunately, the funnel veered slightly to the northeast, passing just to the north of the town. At that point, it was an intense drillpress spinning furiously a mile distant. We closed the gap and tracked with it as it headed toward the larger town of Elmwood, just a couple miles down the road.

What was the funnel doing? It appeared to be shifting to the right. Oh my gosh! Elmwood was going to get hit! The tornado was beginning to rope out, but not in enough time to spare the town. Taking a hard right, it plowed through the town center. Three-quarters of a mile ahead of us, power lines arced and transformers exploded, debris blasted into the air, and a large dust cloud billowed skyward.

It is a weird and awful feeling to witness a community get hit by a tornado. I’ve seen it happen twice before in Springfield, Illinois, and in Iowa City, but those were night time events. It’s different in broad daylight, when you can see what’s happening. The rather blurry photo shown here was taken just before the tornado crossed Main Street in downtown Elmwood. It’s not a very dramatic shot. You can see a few pieces of debris floating in the air and no more than a cloud tag to mark the presence of the tornado. But a second or two after the photo was taken, things got very nasty in that town. If there’s anything at all good to be said about what happened there, it’s that no one got killed or, as far as I’m aware, even injured.

A couple hundred yards south of Elmwood, the tornado dissipated. Gone, poof, vanished just like that. There’s a certain ugly irony about a force of nature that can wreak havoc in a community and then vanish a few seconds later without a trace. If the tornado had dissipated just thirty seconds sooner, a lot of people might have experienced just a good scare rather than a local disaster.

Kurt and I continued tracking with the storm as it made its way toward Peoria. The next tornado soon formed–a larger, bowl-shaped cloud with multiple vortices. This broadened out into a large tornado cyclone with multiple areas of rotation that produced, among other things, a brief but spectacular horizontal vortex. Sorry, I have no photos to show of it. It had gotten too dark, we were moving, and any picture I took at that point would have been blurred beyond recognition.

In Peoria, we got a bit snagged by roads and traffic, but thanks to Kurt’s great driving, we soon found ourselves heading east on I-74. As we crossed the Illinois River, I could see what appeared to be a large cone funnel to our north making its way across what was probably Upper Peoria Lake, silhouetted by frequent strobes of lightning.

Catching CR 115 at Goodfield, we headed north to Eureka, then continued east along US 24. We were still tracking with the storm, which was slowly weakening as the next tornadic supercell to its north began to dominate. It was still no pansy-weight, though, and at Chatsworth, in a final show of strength, it spun down a brief but well-defined rope tornado.

As our storm merged with the northern storm around Kankakee, Kurt and I caught I-57 and headed home. After May 22 in South Dakota, I really didn’t expect that I’d get another decent storm chase in. But this El Nino year, which got off to such a rotten start for storm chasers, now is paying dividends with some highly photogenic tornadoes.

And the season isn’t over yet. There’s no telling what the rest of June may hold. I doubt I’ll be making any more forays this year into the Plains, but if the Great Lakes region continue to light up, I’ve got my camera and laptop ready.

To see more photos from this chase, click here. And while you’re at it, check out the rest of my images of storms, tornadoes, wildflowers, people, and whatnot in my photos section.

Yesterday’s outbreak of supercells in the southeastern Great Lakes was no tornado breeder, but it made for an enjoyable chase. I left Caledonia around 10:30 with Bowling Green in mind as a target, noting that the SPC had outlooked a narrow, northern swath of northeast Indiana and northern Ohio with a 10 percent tornado risk.

I wound up rendezvousing with my long-time chase buddy Bill Oosterbaan in Ashton, Indiana, where Mike Kovalchick also joined us. (Note to self: that Baptist church parking lot on the west edge of town has a fantastic hilltop view to the west.) We dropped south to Waterloo, where I parked my car at a convenience store, then hopped in Bill’s vehicle, and we headed east, watching as a cumulus field began forming overhead. The warm front was moving in, and when we left Ashton, the chilly temps were already rising and bringing the dewpoints with them.

Farther to the east, we hooked up with Ben and Mike Holcomb, and CMU meteorology students Aric Cylkowski and Cort Scholten. Our contingent of four vehicles at the Sonic drive-in made up what was probably the first chaser convergence that Bryan, Ohio, has ever experienced, and probably the last.

From there, we dropped south toward the warm front, which had stalled over the area. Temps had been in the lower 70s in Bryan, with east-northeasterly winds and dewpoints around 59 degrees; farther down the road, at our new location in a parking lot next to a cemetery, we gained another degree of dewpoint and the surface winds veered. On the radar, one discrete cell to our southwest began to take on supercellular  characteristics. We decided to intercept it, and the chase was on.

But another cell formed southwest of our storm, and in its tail-end position, it rapidly evolved into the main player of the day. So we left the storm we were on and headed toward the new one, which was hooking nicely. A couple miles south of the town of Paulding, we encountered one of the most flat-out beautiful hailstorms I’ve ever seen. It moved toward us in shifting, pearly strands across the fields. I tinkered frantically with the settings on my camera in order to get a fast enough shutter speed for snapping pics from our moving vehicle–there was no shoulder to the road, and no stopping–but by the time I finally had what I needed and Bill had found a turn-off, the amazing nuances and texture of the hail shaft had blended into a homogeneous sheet (click image to enlarge). I took a couple quick photos which nowhere near capture the essence of what we had seen just a minute or two prior; then, with maybe thirty seconds to spare from getting cored, we beat a hasty retreat.

Out in the field just to our southwest, we could see a crapload of dust being kicked up by the rear flank downdraft. We pulled aside and let it pass 100 feet or so in front of us. In the photo, notice how the dust fills the ditch to the right. I’ve read some discussions about the wisdom of the longstanding advice to abandon one’s car during a tornado and seek shelter in a ditch. Maybe that’s a best option in a worst-case scenario, but judging from the photo, it looks to me like the wind is doing a pretty good job of invading the ditch. Depending on the depth of a given ditch, tornado-force winds could conceivably just scoop a person up and launch them into the main air stream.

But I digress. The hail and RFD were the highlights of the day. From then on, it truly was a storm chase, and a futile one. With the storm rocketing to the east-northeast at 70 mph, we had a choice of barreling eastward and losing the storm to the north, or northward and watching it vanish to the east. We pursued it longer than we should have, but we had a fun time of it. The roads in that part of Ohio are great, the countryside is flat and open, and overall, the territory is fabulous for chasing. But when storms are moving at such breakneck speeds, the best road grids in the country–and these probably qualify–can’t compensate.

I managed to get a few shots of a cool, bell-shaped wall cloud as the storm moved away from us. Eventually, though, we called the chase off and started on our way back. West of Paulding, we encountered significant wind damage–large trees snapped off at their bases and pieces of outbuildings scattered across the fields at a couple farms. Could have been weak tornado damage, but it was likelier the work of straight-line winds.

I should probably mention the rope funnel that hung down from a small storm as we headed back toward Waterloo. Okay, it wasn’t really a funnel, just evidence of what wishful thinking can do with a snaky-looking cloud.

Back in Waterloo, I picked up my car, hit I-69 north, and headed home.

I noticed that Illinois-based storm chaser Adam Lucio was also on these storms, and appreciated his Facebook comment that you don’t need tornadoes in order to have an enjoyable chase. I wholeheartedly agree. Yesterday was a great chase, particularly for the Great Lakes, and that hail shaft near Paulding alone made my day.

Of course, everyone has been rumbling about the big event shaping up for Monday in the Plains. Wish I could go, but it’s not in the budget. Best wishes to everyone who heads out. Stay safe, get good photos and video, and have fun.

It’s good to see the trains again.

As a jazz saxophonist who loves to practice his horn in his car parked by a set of railroad tracks out in the countryside, I noticed last year that something was missing. Used to be, I could count on seeing the distant semaphore light turn green and watching as a white pinpoint of headlamps miles down the tracks brightened, drawing closer until I could hear the rumble and then the roar of the locomotive and the clatter of freight cars rushing past. I enjoyed that experience at least once, and normally two or three times, during most practice sessions.

But as the bottom dropped out of the economy and Detroit’s auto industry languished, the giant spigots that sent the trains hurtling along the pipeline between Lansing and Grand Rapids closed to a trickle. Those hundred-car, three-locomotive strings I was so used to became, just like that, a thing of yesterday.

Until lately. It gives me much pleasure to say that the trains are returning.

I still don’t see them with the frequency I used to, but I am noticing that there are more of them, and they are growing longer. Two days ago, parked by the tracks in Alto, I paused in my practice to watch as a train boomed by in front of me…and kept on booming. It was one of those hundred-car affairs, just like in the good old days, which really aren’t old at all but certainly were enjoyable.

Now those days seem to be on the way back. It may be a modest return, but the spigots are reopening. It’s heartwarming to think, as I sit by my beloved tracks working out my saxophone chops, that I’m once again likely to hear the sound of another horn, far off in the distance and growing closer, and to feel the powerful, exhilarating, reassuring rhythm of a train rushing by.

I don’t know why so many storm chasers decided to chase in northern Missouri this last Monday. I could have told folks it had “cap bust” written all over it–didn’t fool me for a minute, as you can see by reading my post written the day before.

Ahem…right, so I got snookered too. The GFS was spot on about the cap, and the NAM way underforecast it. As a result, Missouri chasers wound up sitting under relentlessly empty skies waiting for convection to fire. It finally did in northeast Kansas–after dark. Storms ignited along a boundary (the warm front? ) and a couple went supercellular and even tornado-warned for a heartbeat before the cap re-exerted itself and squenched them.

The real action, ironically, took place in central Illinois and Indiana, well east of where most folks–including me–had expected. Supercells cut a swath along the warm front through Terre Haute, Indianopolis, and parts east and southeast into Kentucky, and a number of purple boxes lit up the radar screen. Nevertheless, SPC storm reports list only one confirmed tornado that touched down near Hillsboro, Illinois, northeast of Saint Louis.

Them’s the breaks. I didn’t chase that day, and I’m glad that I didn’t because I’d almost certainly have gotten skunked in Missouri when I could have driven straight south down US 41 to Terre Haute, not even having to mess with Chicago traffic, and waltzed on into the sweet zone.

Ah, well. I chased today–if chasing is what you can call a guaranteed grunge fest–down toward a warm front by the Michigan border. The trip was my compensation prize for not heading out when it really counted these past few days. The SPC had outlooked a five percent tornado risk this afternoon, and supercells were making their way northeast across Illinois toward Indiana. I figured that if they held together, I might catch them, but not surprisingly, they mushed out.

That was okay. I was chasing blind, with no radar and few expectations other than the hope that I’d at least see some lightning. I did, and called it good. The main storm season is still on the way, and there’s no need to fret over spilled milk when the cow is just priming its udder. It won’t be long now.