A weak cold front has slowly been working its way through Michigan today, with storms firing ahead of it in a very soupy warm sector. Ugh! With temperatures the past several days ranging from the upper 80s to 90 degrees and dewpoints as high as 73 here in Caledonia, it’s about time things cooled off and dried out a bit.

Unfortunately–or fortunately, depending on your point of view–all that lovely moisture has been wasted on insipid lapse rates and humdrum wind fields. What can you do with 500 mb winds of 25 knots or less? Answer: not much.

So what’s with that red dot in Wisconsin in yesterday’s storm reports? Not only did a tornado occur near the town of Cambria, but from the looks of the YouTube videos I saw, it was fairly impressive. Certainly those were more than momentary spin-ups which that Little Storm That Shouldn’t Have put down.

How on earth did it do that? There was nothing happening synoptically that suggested even a remote possibility of tornadoes. So when that puny cell across the lake from me went tornado-warned on GR3 yesterday, I just shrugged it off. Obviously a fluke, some weak Doppler-detected rotation, signifying nothing.

Just goes to show how Mother Nature can mess with your head. According to the NWS office in Milwaukee, that little stinker put down a tornado that lasted 14 minutes, traveled four miles, and did EF1 damage. The level 2 velocity couplet on it was unmistakable. Here’s the full writeup by KMKX, complete with radar images and a photo of the storm right after the tornado had lifted.

Storm chaser Scott Weberpal speculated on Stormtrack that there may have been some kind of interaction between an outflow boundary left by earlier convection. I can’t imagine any better explanation for why what should have been a pussycat of a pulse-type summer storm turned into a barn wrecker. Had the storm gone tornadic farther east, the lake breeze might have been suspect, but the cell was well inland from Lake Michigan.

Today I noticed a couple storms over in the Flint area displaying weak rotation on the radar, and one of them took on that telltale supercellular shape. Given the anemic upper winds, I’d normally have instantly written them off, but after yesterday…well, I watched and wondered, not expecting anything and therefore not disappointed when nothing happened, but still curious. What might happen if any cells firing in that vicinity moved into the Huron lake breeze zone, where the veering surface winds were liable to back?

As it turns out, the storms behaved the way you’d have expected them to given their environment. The last of the line is presently moving through southeast Michigan. But dewpoints are still in the low 70s, and a few popcorn cells are sprinkling the radar. Through my sliding glass door, I can see a big, mushy tower making its debut. Think I’ll grab my saxophone and camera and head out to get some practice in. With a little luck, maybe I’ll get a few lightning photos as a bonus.

There’s nothing funny about finding yourself trapped at the end of a dead-end road with multiple tornadoes bearing down on you. It’s not a scenario one anticipates when heading out on a chase, but it’s the one my chase partners Bill and Tom Oosterbaan, Mike Kovalchick, and I found ourselves in, along with seven other vehicles full of chasers, last Saturday in South Dakota.

Up until the moment when the road we were on ended abruptly at the edge of a farmer’s field, we were simply performing a routine maneuver: select an escape route and take it when the storm draws near. We and the other chasers had chosen 130th Street east of CR9 as our best eastbound option. It looked good on both DeLorme Street Atlas and Microsoft Streets & Trips: a nice through road connecting with 353rd Avenue three miles away. It was a perfectly logical choice, and things would have proceeded without incident had the maps been accurate.

What the maps didn’t show was that a farmer had recently plowed over the road, converting it to a field. We made that delightful discovery two miles down. The road had already begun to degrade, rendering a couple mudholes which Mike’s Subaru Outback plowed through without a problem. But the field was a show stopper. Suddenly, poof! No road. On an ordinary day, this discovery would have been an inconvenience. With tornadoes breathing down our neck, it was horrifying.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me backpedal a bit to set the stage. After stopping to enjoy the eminently photogenic fourth tornado that followed the nasty Bowdle wedge (see previous post), the four of us headed north to CR2/125th St., then turned east. The storm was morphing into a high precipitation supercell (photo at top of page). We watched it drop a couple more rain-wrapped tornadoes. Then it pulsed, catching its breath and gathering energy for the next round.

Dropping south down CR9, we pulled aside by a roadside pond to grab a few photos. The updraft area was a couple miles to our west, and while it didn’t presently seem to be tornadic, appearance can be deceptive. The cloud base was low, nearly dragging on the ground, with suspicious lowerings forming and dissipating. It looked like it could drop something at any time, and chances are it was even then producing random, momentary spinups.

Hopping back into our vehicle, we proceeded farther south to the corner of 130th Street, where we once again parked. Here, we bumped into chasers Ben Holcomb, Adam Lucio, Danny Neal, and Scott Bennett. We had last seen these guys at a truck stop in Murdo; now here they were again, along with several other vehicles, all converging out ahead of the meso in the middle of nowhere. In the photo, left to right: Tom, Ben, Bill, and Scott.

As the storm drew closer, Tom pointed out that rotation was beginning to organize overhead. It was time to skedaddle. Back into Mike’s Outback we clambered, with Tom at the wheel, and headed east down 130th Street.

At this point, it’s important to bear in mind that every vehicle that showed up at our location had independently pre-selected 130th Street as a valid escape route. What followed did not begin as a desperate dash for safety, but as a calculated, run-of-the-mill tactical maneuver informed by commonly used mapping software. Most of the people involved were experienced chasers, some of them veterans. The reasoning behind our road choice was sound. Unfortunately, the information we based it on was not.

Thus it was was that two miles down the road, suddenly there was no road. At the front of a string of other chase vehicles, we were the first to make that discovery. Tom turned around and started heading back, yelling to the next vehicles that the road was out. It was then that a tornado suddenly materialized in the field maybe half a mile to our west, just south of the road. It was a regular drill press, spinning furiously as it made its way toward us. It finally crossed the road and headed east-northeast a few hundred feet away, but even as it did so, another, thicker funnel snaked to the ground at roughly the same place where the first one had formed. I don’t think most people saw this second tornado; it moved toward us briefly, kicking up dirt, then dissipated, though I could still see swirling motions in the rain bands where it had been.

In the photo, besides the rope tornado, notice the lowerings farther back. These meant business. We were at the eastern edge of a broad area of rotation that was dropping not suction vortices, but multiple tornadoes of various sizes, intensities, and behaviors. In my observation, these were NOT moving in cyclonic fashion around a common center, but east with the parent storm–and straight at us.

A large cone appeared to the west, which, gathering strength, moved through the field to our north. By this time, it was clear that we were in a truly lethal situation, cut off to the east by a dead-end road and to the west by tornadoes.

Windy? Hell yes it was windy. The inflow was cranking like a sumbitch, and from the looks of things, it was only going to get worse. I looked around for a ditch, but there was absolutely nothing that could have offered protection. I noticed a stout post a few yards away and contemplated lying flat and wrapping my arms around it. Tom had the same idea. Mike was eyeballing a large pile of stones a hundred yards away, thinking it might provide some shelter, but it was too far a dash with no time left to make it in.

It was at this point that UK chaser Nathan Edwards drove off the road and began heading south into the field. He told me later that he was simply attempting to clear some room for other vehicles to move forward, hopefully edging just a little bit closer to out of harm’s way, but Nate’s move prompted the rest of us to follow. In a last-ditch gamble, the entire entourage of chase vehicles began fleeing south along the fence boundary.

The tornadoes were close. Really, they were on top of us. I watched as two funnels formed a couple hundred yard west of our vehicle, twisting around each other and moving toward us like the “sidewinders” in the movie “Twister.” The rain curtain was full of swirls and braids. And what was particularly unsettling was that, as we dashed across the farmland, the business part of the storm seemed to be expanding, reaching out after us. For a mindless force of nature, this storm was displaying as close as you can get to malevolent intent.

It dawned on me that if ever there was a time to pray, and pray hard, this was it. I’m a Christian–a bit of an iconoclast in that I don’t buy into a lot of Western church culture, but I love Jesus, I’m serious about following him, and conversing with God comes naturally to me. I don’t mean just in a pinch, but as a lifestyle. You can bet that at this point, I began praying most intensely.

A couple hundred yards in, we encountered a wet area and ponding and were forced to forge our way into the cultivated field. It was there that the storm caught up with us in earnest. End of the road for real. There was nothing left to do now but hunker down, pray, and hope.

Obviously I’m here to tell the story. All of us are, every last person. That none of us were killed or seriously injured, or for that matter sustained  so much as a scratch, is in my book God’s love and mercy, pure and simple. A video clip by Adam Lucio shows a tornado forming right in our midst, not ten yards from one of the vehicles. I never saw it, but Adam’s video is conclusive and sobering. We came so close, so very close. The rear flank downdraft alone had to have been in the order of 100 miles an hour. Yet nothing truly bad happened to any of us.

Some may call that a lucky draw; I call it answered prayer. Believe what you will, but there’s more to the story, an experience uniquely mine that I’ve shared with only a couple people so far. Look for it in my upcoming, final post concerning this incident. Whatever you make of it, I think you’ll agree that it’s uncanny.

That’s it for now, but this story continues. What followed with the farmer who owned the field, the sheriff and police, and other locals is for another episode, and it’s still not entirely resolved.

I’ll leave you with two images, both taken when the worst of the storm had just moved past us. One shows some of the vehicles getting slammed by the still-hellacious RFD. The other is a GR3 radar grab of the rotation and our location relative to it, shown by the circular GPS marker.

With that, I’ll sign off. Keep an eye out for parts four and five.

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to a brand new decade.

With multiple possibilities for my first blog post in the year 2010, I find myself contemplating a recent thread on Stormtrack, and, in the light of it, reminiscing about my own development as a storm chaser.

The thread started with a newbie chaser asking forum members’ opinions about what constitutes a “veteran chaser.” The guy took a bit of a bashing initially, but to me his question seemed innocent, reflecting honest curiosity rather than a preoccupation with labels or a need to earn some sort of merit badge, and it made for an interesting discussion.

And, as I’ve said, it got me to reflecting on my personal path. One by one, the chase seasons have connected to each other like boxcars on a train. It seems incredible to think that 2010 will mark my fourteenth year chasing storms. If years alone were what it took to make a person a veteran chaser, then I might qualify.

But years alone do not a veteran make–at least, not in my opinion. A veteran road warrior, yes; a veteran storm chaser, no. There are plenty of people who have been chasing a shorter time than me, but who have acquired far more skill and experience. As for me, I’m just a slow but happy learner who’s too low-key to mess with light bars.

However, the span of time I’ve been chasing has allowed me some formative experiences I probably wouldn’t have had if I had started more recently. Today, it seems like the average neophyte steps into the field equipped, if not with knowledge, at least with a laptop, GR3, GPS, and an aircard. He or she has a technological edge that didn’t exist, or that barely existed, back when I was getting started.

I now realize that the simplicity and constraints of those first, low-tech years have left me with a gift of memories. I treasure those thousands of miles I traveled–sometimes by myself, sometimes with Bill and/or Tom Oosterbaan–equipped with nothing more than a weather radio, a portable black-and-white TV set, high hopes, and an eye on the sky.

Radar? I stopped at local libraries and airports and got my fix. I had no idea how long a radar image would be good for, how much difference four-and-a-half minutes and a single scan could make. Today I just shake my head and think, no wonder I never saw any tornadoes. It’s a wonder I managed to see a stinkin’ cloud.

As for forecasting, that consisted of looking at SPC outlooks and then steering for the middle of a moderate or high risk area. At some point, though, I discovered my first link to a site for forecasting models, and an interesting–and daunting–new window opened up. Suddenly, here was a bewildering suite of data–surface dewpoints, BRN shear, CAPE, lifted indices, helicity, 300 mb winds…alchemy, pure alchemy, and in a variety of flavors at that. GFS. ETA. RUC. Hoo boy, talk about dumping a load on my head!

Around that same time, I attended my first severe weather conference at College of DuPage. As I recall, Chuck Doswell conducted a workshop on hand analysis and Eric Rasmussen shared some findings from the first Project Vortex. By then, I knew just enough acronyms and concepts to make sense out of some of what was getting thrown at me. Much of the value lay simply in being exposed to the actual stuff of operational forecasting and severe weather research. There’s something to be said for sheer exposure; even if a body grasps just a fraction of the concepts he encounters, what matters is, it’s a start. I left that conference, and the one that followed it a year or two later, equipped with a little more awareness and a little less ignorance than I had coming in.

My first successful tornado intercept occurred in my first season as a chaser, in 1996, in my home state of Michigan. A wall cloud formed directly south of my workplace, and I left work early to chase it sixty miles to where it put down a beautiful tube out in the open countryside near St. Johns. The storm was a classic supercell, as nice as anything I’ve seen out on the Great Plains, though at the time I had no ground for comparison and knew nothing about storm modes or morphology.

It would be another ten years before I witnessed my next tornado in 2006, as Bill and I tracked the historic Six State Supercell from west of Columbia, Missouri, all the way back to Michigan. Prior to that, I had roamed my state and neighboring Indiana, and pounded the flatlands of Illinois, with just a handful of wall clouds and a growing awareness of storm structure to show for it. The year 2005 was my first excursion across the Mississippi and my first experience watching storms explode along the dryline in central Kansas.

But 2006 was the year when things finally started coming together for me, and I think that Bill–my consistent chase partner for all these years–would say the same, since our personal learning curves have been closely tied together. By then we were using Bill’s business laptop and had access to NOAA radar. I had just discovered the significance of velocity couplets, although, not yet understanding the benefit of using storm relative velocity over base level velocity, I was using the latter. Again, it was a start, and the base level gave us enough data to keep us from very likely getting blown off the road by the Springfield, Illinois, tornado as Bill and I chased the Six State Supercell.

A month later, we intercepted tornadoes in Iowa, including another large, night-time tornado that did F2 damage in Iowa City.

That same year, I acquired my own laptop, and the following spring I added GR3, and from there on, my learning and experience curve began to snowball. Today, as I look at where I started and where I’m now at, I realize that I’ve learned a few things. I’ve gained another great chasing partner in my buddy Kurt Hulst. I’m making my own forecasts with increasing knowledge and accuracy. I haven’t seen a lot of tornadoes, but I’ve seen my share, and I trust that, by God’s grace, I’ll see more, as well as endure more busts and make more idiotic choices that cost me storms I could have had.

So, getting back to the question of what makes a veteran chaser, I’m firsthand proof that there’s more to it than just the number of years a person has been chasing storms. In my opinion, there are actually three components to being a veteran storm chaser:

1. Really, really knowing what the heck you’re doing,

2. Many years of doing it, and

3. Lots of successes and lots of failures to show for it.

I probably fulfill the second criterion. As for the other two, well…I’ve got a ways to go, but I’m working on them. Give me another ten years and maybe the hat will fit. It really doesn’t matter, though. As a general rule, chasers who are worth their salt don’t give a flip about labels. They’re driven by storms, not status. Certain names are indeed revered–icons such as Tim Marshal, David Hoadley, Roger Edwards, and Gene Moore. As for the rest of us mortals, I think that those who’ve been at it a for a while respect others who have paid their dues. We know the names, if not the actual faces, and recognize the shared passion and personal investment behind those names. The countless miles traveled. The commitment to learning and growth.

Above all, the love for the storms that keeps us dreaming all through the winter, and that, in the spring, calls us once again toward the open skies, the tumbled clouds, and the hope and promise of the Plains.

[XUB6K3AQNFKD]

Last night Grand Rapids got its first snowfall, and this morning I switched the color tables on GR3 and GR2 to winter mode.

Ugh. I suppose that blue, pink, and purple are going to rule for the next four months. I much prefer plenty of yellow, orange, and red, at least when it comes to radar displays, but we’re at that time of year when those colors aren’t likely to be very meaningful, El Nino or no El Nino.

While switching color tables is relevant to me as a Michigan resident who’s bracing for the winter, it’s nothing compared to the changes coming down the pike for GR3 and other level 3 data users in February. Here’s a message that Gilbert Sebenste of Allisonhouse, a well-known private supplier of raw radar data, posted in the AH and Stormtrack forums:

We have just been informed by the National Weather Service that starting in February 2010, and lasting through April, 2010…the National Weather Service will add higher resolution Level3 radar data products, replacing quite a few of the ones you use right now. The legacy products will continue to be sent for 6 months after all of the replacement products have been added, and will be discontinued on December 1, 2010.

What it all means in a nutshell is this:

1. Resolution will increase
2. The number of reflectivity levels will increase to 256 (meaning you will need to have 256 colors in your color palette to display all the intensity levels)
3. The volume of the files will double, on average
4. The Level3 format will change
5. It will be completed by the end of March, 2010…with legacy products ending 12/1/2010.

Allisonhouse will be working closely with its software partners to provide a seamless as possible transition to the newer and better products upon receipt of transmission from the National Weather Service, and we will provide you with more information as it becomes available.

Wow. Now those, folks, are changes, and it looks like they’ll be here right in time for storm season 2010. High-res level 3–imagine that! My one issue with level 3 has been its coarseness, but that problem is about to be solved. Within a few short months, level 3 data will be coming to us with the same finely shaded resolution as high-res level 2 while remaining a usable product in the field, which is what GR3 is designed for.

Of course, no chaser is going to love the idea of doubling the file sizes. But the improvements look to be awesome, and will give us much more detailed images of storms.

Other Changes on the Way

.

Exciting as the rapidly approaching implementation of high-res level 3 data is, it’s not the only significant development on the horizon. Next year will also see a major phasing-in of dual-pole radar to WSR-88D stations throughout the country. And in the private sector, Andrew Revering of Convective Development, Inc., is working on a huge upgrade for F5 Data forecasting software.

In summary, the technical/informational side of storm chasing will be seeing some significant advancements in the coming year. However many of those improvements are ready for next spring’s severe weather season, let’s just hope that the storms themselves put in a decent appearance.

Users of GR3 and other Gibson Ridge radar products, rejoice! GRLevelXStuff.com has returned!

A couple months after the site’s disastrous crash, I had pretty much concluded that Aaron et al had given up on it as too time-consuming and costly to resurrect. But tonight, just on a whim, I clicked on their bookmark, and lo and behold, there was ‘Stuff in all its glory.

If you’re already familiar with GRLevelXStuff, this should be good news indeed. If you’re not in the know about it and you use GR3, GR2, or GR2AE, then you definitely need to get acquainted with the site. In its past incarnation, before the disastrous crash that wiped out the entire database, barring the stuff that Aaron had saved on his hard drive, ‘Stuff was the premier support forum for Gibson Ridge users. It was a massively helpful resource in terms of both knowledge and applications. The color table section alone was enormous, and the background section of topo maps couldn’t be beat.

So this is my plug for the reborn GRLevelXStuff. Aaron and his team are hard at work rebuilding it, and such a project requires a community effort. If you use a GRL product, I urge you to visit the site, give the lads a well-deserved thumbs-up, and get involved. Registration–or re-registration, if you were a member of the pre-crash site–takes just a second.

One other thing: if you can afford to, please make a donation. It’s very easy to do so, and every dollar will help. GRLevelXStuff provides a terrific service, and it’s well worth getting behind with your dollars as well as your goodwill. Aaron has been upfront about the costs involved in recreating and maintaining the site, and the need for financial assistance. I just dropped my farthing in the collection basket, and I hope you will, too, if at all possible. Let’s do our best to help make the new ‘Stuff better than ever.

Earlier today, I opened up GR3 just out of curiosity and noticed some blobs of convection along the Lake Michigan shore by Chicago. Here are a couple radar grabs.

These images interest me for several reasons, all of which have to do with a Great Lakes phenomenon called the lake breeze zone. The lake breeze zone is not a fixed area. Its boundaries are atmospheric, not geographic.

And boundaries truly are what it’s all about. Probably the most immediately noticeable feature on these radar images, besides the obvious storms, is the north-south boundary set up by the onshore breeze. It’s a great point of convergence where overall westerly surface winds butt up against backing winds from off the big lake. You can see how outflow from the storms that have fired up within the lake breeze zone interacts with the lake breeze boundary.

Another less immediately obvious by-product of the lake breeze zone is helicity. Notice how the wind barbs farther inland are all westerly, but inside the lake breeze zone, they’re easterly. Now, I’m no expert on this stuff, but I know enough to recognize the potential for localized helicity to occur even when the large-scale flow is unidirectional. During the day, strong thunderstorms can go tornadic when they encounter a backing onshore breeze near Chicago, along the Wisconsin shoreline, and along the Lake Huron and Lake Erie shores of eastern Michigan. The same can happen in the evening along Michigan’s western coast as the land cools and an offshore breeze prevails. Many times I’ve noticed the NAM and RUC showing a small sigtor centerered over Berrien County when there are no sigtors anywhere else in the region, and I’m sure this phenomenon is largely due to the lake breeze in that area.

Right now I see storms firing up farther north around Gladwin and Roscommon.

A glance at the Gaylord VWP shows west winds neatly stacked from the surface on up. But look at the METARs along Lake Huron. Without much in the way of bulk shear, the storms are subsevere, just little popcorn cells. But it will nevertheless be interesting to see what comes of them as they work their way into those backed shoreline winds. You just never know.

One year ago today, the second EF5 tornado in the history of the new Enhanced Fujita Scale rating system descended on Parkersburg, Iowa, and obliterated the southern third of the town. I and fellow storm chasers Bill and Tom Oosterbaan and Jason Harris could see the intense rotation moving over Parkersburg on GR3 as we stairstepped southeast from the northern edge of the cell, heading for an intercept. There’s a certain sense of disbelief when you see something like that, a feeling of, Naah, it can’t be as bad as it looks.

But it was. A few miles farther down the road, with the rotation still at least ten miles to our west, debris–some of it fairly large–began to fall from the sky. That was when we knew for sure. Something terrible had happened. Even with pieces of sheet metal clanging down onto the pavement in front of us, I had a hard time believing that a tornado disaster had just occurred, but I think we all felt a certain sober awareness that a community had been hit.

We intercepted the storm near Fairbank, where the NWS indicates that the Parkersburg tornado occluded. Parking on a sideroad, we watched as a large, new wall cloud formed and moved directly toward us. Warning an Amish family who was standing in their yard, watching, to take shelter, we scooted south and then east, watching as the wall cloud lowered and kicked up a ton of dust. A second, enormous tornado had formed, barely discernible through the haze. We tracked with it to the east as it headed on a collision course for Hazleton, mercifully grazing the southern edge of that town. Had it hit head-on, I suspect that the Hazleton tornado’s EF3 rating would have been higher.

It’s hard to believe that a whole year has passed since that event and the several days of Great Plains action that preceded it. What a difference between then and now, with a nasty ridge casting a pall on this May’s peak chase season.

In remembrance of the Parkersburg/Hazleton tornadoes, I’m including a couple visuals. The first is a radar grab of the supercell as it moved out of Parkersburg. The tornado icon is a storm report from the town, just minutes old. You can see our GPS position marked by a circle with a dot in the middle of it on the northeast edge of the storm

The second is this YouTube link to my video of the Hazleton tornado. My videography may not be the best in the world, but I think you’ll get a sense of the intensity this storm evoked. It was my first really big tornado, and it was close.

I doubt this year has anything in store for us  like what we saw that day. But who knows? I’m not ready to write off this chase season yet–though I certainly hope it doesn’t hold a catastrophe like the Parkersburg tornado.