And so we head back into winter, or winter heads back into us. Yesterday, temperatures hit the forty-five degree mark, the streets ran with water, and the whole landscape appeared to be in meltdown. Yet today, as the snow flies outside, the notion that storm chasing season lies just around the corner seems almost absurd. Nothing outside my window offers so much as a hint of spring weather on the way. The borders of the parking lot at my apartment are demarcated with tall piles of snow, and I”m sure that by tomorrow morning, the plow will have plenty more material to work with.

This afternoon, after a sushi lunch at the Tokyo Grill, I saw my close friend Kimberly off at the airport. She came out for an all-too-brief but very nice visit for my birthday, which is today. We had a great time, which included dinner yesterday with my mother and sister; and on the day before, Saturday, a drive along the Lake Michigan coastline. The ice formations are spectacular this year, and Kimberly, who lives in California, had never seen them. They were quite beautiful, with thin clouds of wind-driven snow spray dusting across them, driven by a chill west wind and lit by the evening sun.

As I write, Kimber is homeward bound, and I can hear the wind whooshing through the trees outside (my gosh, is it really blowing steadily at twenty-four miles an hour?), sounding every bit as cold as the eighteen degrees that the airport METAR indicates.

Yet the sun rose at 7:36 this morning and set at 6:15 here in Caledonia, Michigan. And my online sunrise-sunset calendar shows that between today and the end of this leap-year February, we will gain another thirty-one minutes. I like that thought. Winter really isn”t here to stay. It may seem like that”s the case right now, but in just a matter of weeks, those springtime lows will come swinging like giant wrecking balls out of the Pacific Northwest down into the plains, deepening as they travel, sucking in moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, and making life a lot more interesting for storm chasers.

I”m particularly excited about one of the tools I”ll have in my chase kit this spring. For quite a while now, Andrew Revering has been hard at work on a major upgrade of his fabulous F5 Data forecasting software. Besides an extensive graphical overhaul, the new version will include the addition of GFS to the suite of forecast models. I used F5 Data quite heavily last year and loved it. The upgrade is due to be released any day, now, and I”ve been looking forward to it with the eagerness of a kid on…well, on his birthday. With two chases already under my belt between January 7 and February 5, I anticipate that my F5 subscription will get a lot of use this year.

So let the snows fly. Not long from now, those wintry blasts will weaken into emphysemic frailty, and gasp their last as the Gulf of Mexico reopens for business. I”m ready. Can you tell?

I admit it: I”m guilty. After that last post, in which I made it plain that my mind was made up, I was going to stay put and not, nix, nada, no way chase storms, I went anyway. The RUC 13 prediction of usable CAPE working its way up into Indiana was eating at me–that, and too many past experiences of watching the action spread northeast of the weather watch areas. All it took was another phone call from Bill to tip me over the edge.

We hooked up in Nappanee, Indiana, then blasted south. The big storms fired up to the southwest, as expected, and are presently dropping tornadoes down in Tennessee and Mississippi, and presumably in Arkansas and Kentucky as well. But the daylight is long gone, and we”re heading for Louisville for the night. The storms will almost certainly catch up with us there sometime later tonight, and we could be in for a rough ride. My radar will be up and running, that much is certain.

So much for iron resolve in the face of a high risk day. Pffffttt! Ah, well…it”s better than staring at the radar screen in my apartment with fried-egg eyeballs, tearing my hair out by the handful and wishing I”d gone.

Plans now consist of the following:

1. Check into hotel

2. Go to a restaurant for a good steak and brew

3. Head back to the hotel, flip on GR2 and GR3, and watch the storms move in

That approach works for me.

Aaaaah, nuts! I HATE missing a storm chase–and on the first high risk day of the year, no less. Problem is, the setup is more iffy for the area I can get to down in southern Indiana.

My chase partner, Bill, has a business meeting in northern Indiana, and we had talked about connecting in Nappanee afterwards. The guy who is with him would have used my car to get back home, and Bill and I would have taken off from there and overnighted in Louisville, Kentucky. But the big action is forecast to be well off to the southwest, down in Arkansas and the Missouri boot heel. Nothing in the forecast models has made me think there”s much hope for Indiana, at least during the daylight hours. Sketchy possibilities at best, and I have business to attend to and an appointment this afternoon. So I told Bill I needed to decline.

But now comes the latest RUC 13 run, which moves 500 CAPE farther north through Illinois and Indiana, not all that terribly far south of Indianapolis. Plus, the WRF radar simulation for later today shows a line of storms extending all along through that area–and forecast storm motions suggest that any storms which form, while clipping along at a decent rate, will still be chaseable, not fifty-mile-an-hour space shuttles. Moreover, I bear in mind that so often, these big systems have tended to propagate farther to the northeast than the Storm Prediction Center anticipated. All this to say, I can picture myself sitting at my computer later in the day, watching as vigorous supercells light up the radar south of Indianapolis and wishing like crazy I had gone.

Sigh. Well, sometimes ya just have to make the hard calls. I have a copywriting business to attend to, and a website I”m trying to optimize. If Bill and I could get to the high risk area, then the choice would have been a no-brainer. Faced with a borderline scenario, though, and the likeliness that any real action for Indiana won”t ramp up till after dark, I need to attend to other priorities and content myself with chasing from the armchair later today.

I have a feeling, though, that I”m gonna be one frustrated camper around five o”clock.

What is with this winter? Two January warm-ups with severe weather, followed by two major winter storms–and now, another warm-up poised for Monday and Tuesday, with some potentially significant activity in the South, possibly reaching as far north as Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. My, life is interesting, at least if you”re a weather freak.

Without looking at the latest numerical models, just talking off the top of my head as I remember my last, quick glance at things last night, it looks like a vigorous trough will be swinging into the southern Great Plains, drawing up fifties dewpoints into northern Illinois and Indiana, with even better moisture in the Dixie alley. Nice, southerly surface winds veering to the southwest with height, respectable 0-6k vertical shear–there”s a weather event shapin” up, folks. I”m not a seasoned forecaster, but I can make sense out of the GFS and the WRF. And I see that the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) is seeing the same thing. They”ve got a nice, large area scoped out for Tuesday in their convective outlooks.

Chase weather? Mmm…maybe. I don”t like that the SPC is calling for a squall line. Evidently we”re looking at another vigorous cold front, same as last week, with large-scale, linear forcing. I can”t see making a lengthy road-trip for that kind of scenario. Still, the shear is good, and with enough low-level helicity, any storms that pop up ahead of the line could prove interesting. Of course, with decent backing winds, the potential will also exist for embedded supercells in the squall line, but we get our share of those in Michigan. I don”t much care for them. They”re hard to chase, and I”m sure not going to waste gas on them unless they come knocking on my back door–say, in Indiana.

We”ll see. Right now, I”m really just rambling. I”ll have a better idea of what”s going to happen come Monday evening. Meanwhile, the snow lies on the ground, more of it than anyone ever expected this winter. And winter is far from over, at least if Punxatawney Phil is a reliable prognosticator. Today is Groundhog Day, and ol” Phil didn”t see his shadow, so…we”re looking at still more snow following this next round of severe weather.

I did mention that life is interesting when you”re a weather freak, didn’t I?

This January has unquestionably been the strangest one I can remember, and I”ve experienced fifty-one of them. The month opened with a bang, with a tornado outbreak on the seventh. That was followed by a period of blizzards and bitter cold. Come tomorrow, another round of mid-forties temps and thunderstorms will be staring us in the hairy eyeball, with yet another blast of mid-teens Arctic air chasing hard on its heels. What a thermal roller-coaster!

Global warming, you say? Well, could be. But the problem with making such a quick assumption is, it ignores the fact that climate is simply a broad-scale averaging of anomalies. Extremes in the weather are, in a sense, the norm, and the uncommon isn”t all that unusual.

The twentieth century closed with the highest tornadic wind speeds ever recorded, clocked at over 300 miles per hour in the nightmare that rolled through Oklahoma City on May 3, 1999. And that tornado was just one in a devastating central Okalahoma outbreak.

n”Well, there you go,” you say. “More storms and stronger storms. Global warming.”

Not so fast, hoss.

The worst recorded tornado outbreak in modern history–the notorious Super Outbreak of April 3-4, 1974–was twenty-five years prior, long before global warming had been invented. With 148 tornadoes affecting thirteen states, and with an unmatched six tornadoes receiving an F5 rating, that event far outstrips the 1999 Oklahoma outbreak.

Okay, right–that”s still relatively recent history. Let”s go back considerably farther. On March 18, 1925, the Great Tri-State Tornado claimed 695 lives during its three-and-a-half-hour, 219-mile blitzkrieg across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. In terms of fatalities, longevity, and path length, as well as size, intensity, and forward speed, the Tri-State was a phenomenon among phenomena.

But can you draw inferences from such a storm regarding climate change? No more, I think, than you can from a 100-year flood. Such things simply happen.

Am I suggesting that global warming isn”t a real and present concern? Of course not; I think it”s pretty well established that we”ve got a problem on our hands. What I am saying is, a lot of factors go into creating weather events of any kind. Moreover, we are far more aware of whatever weather is occurring at any given time and location today than we were thirty years ago. Our warning technology has vastly improved. And our population has grown, meaning there are simply a whole lot more people around to notice the weather and feel its impact. The fact that your house got washed away by a storm surge doesn”t necessarily mean hurricanes have gotten worse; it means you built your house in a vulnerable location, just as multiplied thousands of people have been doing these past few decades, and the inevitable finally caught up with you.

I”m all for making balanced connections between storms and global temperature increases. But I”m not much of a fan for drawing snap, simplistic conclusions. Weather extremes of one sort or another occur just about every year. They”re not all that unusual. They”re just extremes. They were happening long before the polar ice cap went into meltdown. They”ll continue to happen. They are what they are–something to consider as parts of a much bigger picture. The picture is indeed an alarming one, but an alarmist perspective on isolated events neither explains nor solves anything.