Tornadoes — Page 11

August Reminiscences: My First Successful Storm Chase

Ah, August. In its own way, it’s a lot like February: a month whose respective season of the year has settled in and ripened into predictability. Upper winds are weak and storms are often the pop-up type, providing a quick flash-and-bang along with localized rainfall before fizzling out. Yet on the horizon, like the first cirrus wisps of a fast-moving cold front, you can see change coming.

This morning I awakened to the distant grumble of thunder, and when I opened the drapes, the sky was an odd, fish-flesh paleness with darkness moving in. Oh, joy! Upon hearing me stir, Lisa stepped into the room with a smile and told me that a squall line was approaching. Now, that’s the way I like an August day to begin! I fired up the computer and consulted GR3. It was a skinny line, but the NWS was saying big things about it’s being quite the wind machine. Eight miles up the road, the KGRR station ob reported heavy rain; yet here in Caledonia, we got just a mild spray of precipitation, the lightning called it quits, and the line which had threatened to enter like a lion left like a lamb. Now it’s no longer even detectable on the radar.

More thunder is in the forecast for today, though, and for the next few days, as a weak warm front sloshes back and forth and as air mass storms generate more boundaries to fire up convection. It’ll be a bland but enjoyable show.

While my attitude toward August may seem patronizing, this month is capable of producing an occasional potent surprise. On August 24, 2007, I was sitting in the Hastings library when a line of storms formed just to the west and drifted directly overhead. I had my laptop with me with GR3 running, but my forecasting skills and overall experience were still pretty embryonic, and I dismissed some telltale signs, both radar and visual, because forecast models indicated a straight-line wind event.

The storms matured overhead, blasting Hastings with rain and lightning, and then moved to the east and steered an EF-3 tornado through the town of Potterville. I could have easily intercepted it if I had known what the heck I was doing. There it was, a perfect chase opportunity, gift-wrapped with a large ribbon and dropped smack into my lap, and I was too dumb to untie the bow. Aaargh! Four years later, I could still whap myself alongside the head.

But God showers his kindness even on the ignorant. My first successful chase was eleven years earlier, back in August of, I believe, 1996. I don’t remember the exact date, but I can assure you that in those days, cluelessness was a level of expertise I had yet to attain. However, I had at least learned a few things about storm structure and a few concepts such as shear and CAPE. So when the morning blossomed into an exceptionally sticky day–dewpoints had to have been in the mid-70s–and when I noticed clouds in the afternoon leaning over and curling at the tips, I sensed that something was up.

Around 4:30, I happened to glance out of one of the wrap-around windows at the place where I worked and did a double-take. A wall cloud was forming just a mile or so to my south. Hot dang! I watched it for a bit as it moved eastward, then decided to do something about it.

Leaving work early, I hopped into my little Nissan Sentra and blasted after the storm. I had no laptop, no radar, no weather radio, no experience, and very little knowledge. Instinctively I stayed to the south side of the storm. But as it neared Ionia, I could no longer make out cloud features. I wasn’t even certain that the storm still existed. I hit M-21 and traveled east a ways, then north, smack into the precip core. Yep, the storm was still there. But where was the wall cloud? Was there still a wall cloud?

Emerging from the rain, I headed back west, then south down M-66, effectively circling the supercell. As I approached Ionia from the north, the wall cloud came once again into view. Cool! The storm most definitely still had its teeth.

I tracked behind the storm down M-21, getting right to the rear edge of the circulation. Near Muir, a streak of white condensation shot suddenly out of the woods on the right side of the road half a mile in front of me. Was that a tornado? I wasn’t sure, but it looked mighty promising. Also a bit unnerving. I dropped back and put a little more distance between me and the updraft area.

A while later, somewhere in the open country around St. Johns, I parked and observed as the wall cloud reorganized east of me. While I didn’t realize it at the time, I was watching a classic supercell, as nicely structured and impressive as anything I’ve seen out in the Great Plains. It tightened up, with a nice inflow band feeding into it. Then, to my astonishment, a beautiful, slender white tube materialized underneath it a mile away. Extending fully to the ground, the ghost-like tube translated slowly to my right for a distance of probably no more than half a mile, then dissipated. I had just seen my first tornado!

At that point, the storm weakened. No doubt it was just pulsing, but I dropped it and headed for home. However, I soon discovered that another storm was right on the heels of the first one, making a beeline toward me down M-21.

What were the odds that it, too, would be a supercell? Plenty, of course, but to me at that time they seemed as remote as lightning striking twice in the same place. Nevertheless, something told me that I needed to exercise caution, a hunch that verified as I headed back into Muir. An evil-looking flying saucer meso was approaching the town. Hmmm…maybe it would be prudent of me to drop south.

A couple miles out of the path of the updraft, I parked, got out of the car, and stood on the roadside listening to the thunder grumble and watching as the mesocyclone drifted uneventfully over Muir and vanished off to the northeast. Then I climbed back into my vehicle and headed back to M-21, and west toward home.

I was stoked. I had witnessed my very first tornado! Wow! Thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you, thank you!

It was a milestone in my life so huge that hitting the deer just outside of Ada seemed like practically a non-event. Within a nanosecond, the yearling bounded out of the woods and into my path, driven by a powerful urge to bond with my radiator. Much to both of our chagrin, it succeeded.

But you know, I love a good story, and I recognized all the elements of a great one, a real red-letter day. Not only had I experienced my first successful storm chase, but to top it off, I had also collided with a whitetail and demolished my front end. It doesn’t get much better than that–or at least, it wouldn’t until fourteen years later on May 22, 2010, in South Dakota. That was the ultimate storm chasing experience. But that’s another story.

As for this story, all fun and excitement aside, I had learned a sobering lesson about the dangers of storm chasing. I had come face to face with the dark side of nature–with a force that, beautiful as it was, was also fearful, uncontrollable, and deadly, capable of wreaking havoc on a scale that beggars description. No question about it, deer are dangerous. I enjoy seeing them at a distance, just not up close.

August 8, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Michigan, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: August, classic supercell, distant grumble of thunder, edge of the circulation, EF-3 tornado, first successful storm chase, inflow band, lightning, mesocyclone, my first tornado, Potterville, precip core, squall line was moving in, storms, wall cloud was forming

Survivor Guilt: The Unseen Tornado Trauma

“The thief comes only to rob and kill and destroy; I have come that [you] may have life, and have it to the full.”–Jesus (John 10:10)

Forty-five years after he lost his younger brother in one of the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes, Pete Johnson still finds it hard to talk about what happened that dreadful evening in northern Indiana. He feels responsible for his brother’s death.

The name Pete Johnson is fictitious. I doubt the man I interviewed yesterday afternoon would mind if I shared his real name or that of his brother, but my conversation with him is so fresh, and my topic so potentially sensitive, that out of care and respect I’m calling him Pete in this post.

Pete was with his family visiting an aunt and uncle in Dunlap, Indiana, when the deadliest tornado of the entire six-state outbreak swirled into view outside the picture window. As his relatives sought shelter indoors, Pete’s parents packed the kids into their car and took off down the road in a frantic attempt to outrun the tornado. They didn’t succeed. Pete’s dad told him that a house hit the car. All Pete remembers is experiencing a blow to the head and then regaining consciousness out in a field, where he’d been blown by the wind. Rescue workers rushed him off to a hospital. It would be some time before he learned that his younger brother, Mark, hadn’t survived.

Mark’s body wasn’t found until a week later, buried under debris in the devastated Sunnyside neighborhood. Pete wants to believe that his brother’s death wasn’t his fault. But still, after all these years, he wonders: What if…?

What if he’d gone straight to the car instead of hiding in the closet, as his aunt had told him to do? Maybe those few extra seconds would have saved his brother’s life. What if his family had ridden out the tornado at his aunt and uncle’s house, which sustained only minimal damage? What if…?

There’s no satisfying the what-ifs of survivor guilt. You can respond to them with your head, perhaps, but your heart doesn’t buy the answers, not when the wound goes as deep as the loss of a loved one taken by a disaster. There’s seemingly no closure, no tying off of the open ends, no last stone to turn after which the supply of unturned stones finally ceases. At the bottom of it all lies a tyrannical, perpetually haunting lie: “I’m to blame.”

People with survivor guilt suffer–and “suffer” is an appropriate word–from a form of self-imposed penance for not having been the one to perish instead of their loved one. Reliving the incident year after year, they blame themselves for failing to foresee the unforeseeable and stop the unstoppable, for not preventing things over which they had no power. Really, for not being God.

Tornadoes are quirks of the atmosphere, not so much objects as unfathomably powerful processes dependent on an ironically delicate balance of ingredients. Earlier this year I watched one take out the heart of an Illinois town, then disappear into nothingness seconds later. Like lions and Alaskan brown bears, tornadoes are magnificent but also deadly and unpredictable.

As a storm chaser, I’m captivated by the beauty and drama of tornadoes. Yet I’m also keenly aware of their dark side. Who isn’t? The human impact of tornadoes, when it occurs, is seldom conservative and often it’s wholesale. Homes blown to pieces. Trees debarked, debranched, uprooted and thrown hundreds of feet. Vehicles crumpled into balls of metal. Worst of all, bodies mangled and lives ended.

But there’s another kind of damage that can’t be seen. Long after the dead have been buried, long after houses and neighborhoods have been rebuilt, years after people have gotten on with their lives, a sadness lingers. And for many, survivor guilt haunts them. You can build a new home, you can buy a new car, but you can’t replace a loved one, and what do you do with your own wounded heart?

I believe there’s healing for those who struggle with survivor guilt. I don’t mean the sorrow of losing someone close; that will always remain, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. But the sting of guilt which serves no good purpose is exactly the kind of thing Jesus came to put an end to.

Let me be clear, as I share from a Christian perspective, that I have little interest in dogma, any more than Jesus did. The wounds that life can inflict are too real for game-playing. But just as it’s possible to glibly quote the Bible in a way that misses its meaning and heart, it’s equally possible to lightly dismiss the Bible and so miss not only its unnervingly pinpoint assessment of the human condition, but also the power and hope of the gospel for some very practical life issues.

The life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus reveal the heart of a God who desires that we should find true, deeply rooted peace in our souls that flows from the peace we have with him. For those who trust in him, Jesus has resolved the issue of guilt in all its forms, including survivor guilt, with a power and effectiveness that extend beyond the unpredictable events of our lives to a deep and certain, eternal foundation. In his execution on the cross, Jesus took everything that runs counter to the character and will of God and, absorbing it into himself as the eternal scapegoat for mortal mankind, put it to death. Then, in his resurrection, he opened the doorway to a new kind of life that is not subject to the values and limitations of this world.

This is fancy language, but for those who struggle with survivor guilt, the bottom line is simple: God looks at you and says, “Not guilty.” His heart toward you is that you should have life, not death; peace, not self-recrimination. That’s no mere religious proposition–it’s the living, breathing, passionate longing of God for your best, your freest, and your highest.

Given the reality of what God desires for you, the question isn’t whether you could have done something that might have saved your loved one. You’ll never know. That question is a deception from the devil, who loves to torment people with issues that have endless complexities and no resolution. It’s really no question at all–it’s a prison sentence and a distraction from the simplicity of faith. The true, powerful question is whether you’ll stop holding yourself accountable when God himself doesn’t, and stop beating up an innocent person whom he loves very much: yourself.

As you consider that question, here’s another one to contemplate along with it: If the situation had been reversed and you had been the one who perished while your loved one lived, would you have wanted your surviving loved one to live the rest of their days with the guilt that has haunted you? Wouldn’t you rather have desired with all your heart that he or she would think of you with love but not guilt, and fulfill the gift and potential of their life in freedom?

What you would want for your loved one would surely be your loved one’s desire for you. Love does not condemn, but frees and blesses.

I realize that what I’ve proposed is easier said than done. I just want to put the possibility before you–the seed of a new way of thinking which, I hope, can make a difference for you. I’m well aware that I haven’t experienced what you’ve experienced. My struggles have been my own. Yet they have been significant in their own right, and in the face of them, Jesus has made me a freer man as only Jesus can. So my words to you are spoken both humbly and frankly, with a longing that you should know peace at last, peace that only the love and grace of God can bring.

One of the titles by which the Scriptures call Jesus is “Prince of Peace.” The peace he offers rests not on life circumstances, but on an interpersonal relationship with him in which the quality of life that resides in him flows to us. It is a life in which guilt, shame, and torment can’t be found. If you belong to him, then the peace which is native to that life is more than his will for you–it is your very birthright as a child of God.

My prayer for you, if you struggle with survivor guilt, is that your birthright will become real to you in a way that frees you from a weight that is not really yours to carry. Bring it to Jesus and trust him with it. You don’t know what to do with it; he does. Letting him do so is a journey he’s eager to make with you if you’re willing to make it with him.

July 31, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Christian Spirituality & Inspiration, Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes, blame, brother's death, buried under debris, Jesus, outrun the tornado, power and hope of the gospel, prayer, Prince of Peace, Sriptures, storm chaser, survivor guilt, the Bible, the devil, tornado trauma, what-ifs of survivor guilt, wounded heart

July 22 West Michigan Supercell and Lightning Fest

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.

July 23, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Michigan, Outdoors, Photography, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: 1 km helicities, Allegan County supercell, anvil crawlers, beavertail, inflow stinger, Kurt Hulst, lightning cells, lightning fest, mesocyclone, non-stop lightning, Saugatuck, storm, storm structure, thunder, tornado-warned, wall cloud, West Michigan supercell

1965 Palm Sunday Tornado Book: The Next Phase

Even as my book “The Giant Steps Scratch Pad” nears completion–it now awaits only the cover, which is being designed by a graphic designer friend of mine–my other, more ambitious project is also moving along. That would be my book on the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes.

With important (to me, at least) information in my hands and a key interview now completed, the latest delay has been purely my own making. But it’s about to end. This afternoon I head down to Elkhart, Indiana, to interview my first two tornado survivors, one a retired police officer and the other an emergency worker who helped with rescue operations at the Midway Trailer Court.

This is exactly the boot in the butt I need to get myself going on the next phase of the book: firsthand accounts of tornado survivors. In the months to come, I anticipate making trips to northern Indiana and southeast Michigan, not to mention places in my hometown area of Grand Rapids, in order to get people’s stories straight from the sources.

If anyone reading this post was directly involved in the tornadoes (that is, you got hit by one of the tornadoes or otherwise witnessed a tornado in action) or knows of someone who was whom you think I might want to interview, please leave a comment on this post or else contact me.

Also, if you know of photographs of the actual storms that aren’t already in common circulation, I’d be keenly interested in seeing them. I’m not talking about damage photos, nor am I talking about photos such as the twin funnels hitting Midway that are accessible online. Rather, I’m thinking of old, long-forgotten photographs that might be sitting in your dresser drawer that you or your Uncle Pete snapped with the old Brownie camera. That kind of picture.

This next part will take time to complete, but it should be easier overall than the first part, particularly the second chapter. More updates will follow when I have news that’s worth sharing.

July 22, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes, Midway Trailer Court, rescue operations, tornado survivors

While I Was Out Chasing Sunday’s Storms…

Win a few, lose a few, the saying goes. Maybe so, but when it comes to chasing storms in Michigan, sometimes the losses seem just flat-out absurd.

Take this last Sunday, for instance. Kurt Hulst and I traveled over a hundred miles in order to intercept a storm down by Plainwell and track with it through the jungles of Allegan and Barry Counties, searching for a decent location for viewing. Meanwhile, a cell blew up just to our north and put down a tornado just four miles southwest of my apartment in Caledonia. If that isn’t a swift kick in the pratt with the steel-toed boot of irony, I don’t know what is.

True, it was a weak tornado; and true, it was probably rain-wrapped and hard to see; and true, it lasted only a minute or so, and catching it would have been pure serendipity. But still…just four freeking miles away… In the words of the inimitable Charlie Brown, “AAAUUUGGHHHHH!!!”

Sunday wasn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to me, either. A few years ago, I was heading back north through Indiana, homeward bound from a futile chase, when my buddy Bill Oosterbaan called to inform me that a tornado had just passed through Caledonia. If I had been home, I could have stepped outside my sliding door and watched it blow through a couple blocks to my east. But no, that would have been too simple. I had to go gallivanting all over the countryside in search of what, in my absence, was delivered gift-wrapped to my backyard.

Chase storms for a while and you’ll find yourself collecting flukes, ironies, hindsights, and head-banging experiences like some people collect porcelain animals. It just goes with the territory, particularly if you live in the Great Lakes, where picking a chase target is nine times out of ten just an educated crapshoot.

Well, what the heck–at least Kurt and I saw a fairly impressive wall cloud east of Plainwell, out near West Gilkey Lake. We were too far away to confirm rotation, but the cloud was morphing rapidly, displaying obvious rapid motion. For a minute I thought it might even be putting down a tornado, but at our distance, we couldn’t make out enough details to know one way or the other. I called in a report to KGRR, then watched the storm fizzle and die shortly after.

Here one second, gone the next–that’s how it goes here in Michigan, supercell heaven of the Midwest.

July 21, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Michigan, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: Caledonia, chase storms, chasing storms in Michigan, Great Lakes, picking a chase target, supercell heaven, tornado, wall cloud east of Plainwell

Tornado Event Shaping Up for Tomorrow in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin

Look at this skew-T and hodograph and tell me they’re not to die for. They’re the 00Z NAM for tomorrow, 21Z, at Rochester, Minnesota. Click on the images to enlarge them. (Apologies for the weird pulldown menu obscuring parts of the images. I don’t know why that happened.)

Unfortunately, I can’t afford to chase tomorrow, but I have a hunch that those who do will be rewarded for their efforts. This particular sounding is just a sampler. I’m not sure what to think about that surface-based CAPE. It’s

over 6,000 J/kg. If that even comes near to verifying, the western Great Lakes could be in for a convective blitzkrieg. The 1 km EHI is 5.8 and the 4 km VGP is .968. Lifted index at -12.6–can that be right? I guess I kind of suspect readings like that–the instability seems just plain absurd.

Wish I could make it out there. Good luck to those who do, and stay safe. For a summer setup, this thing looks insane. I will be watching the radar tomorrow evening, that’s for sure.

July 13, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: EHI, Great Lakes, lifted index, skew-T and hodograph, surface-based CAPE, tornado event

Freak Tornado in Wisconsin

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.

July 8, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Michigan, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: Cambria, Doppler-detected rotation, EF1 damage, GR3, lake breeze zone, outflow boundary, popcorn cells, remote possibility of tornadoes, storms, tornado in Wisconsin

Fiasco in the Farmer’s Field

So there we were, a whole bunch of storm chasers, stuck in the middle of a flooded field north of Roscoe, South Dakota. Why were we there? Believe me, it wasn’t for the beer.

It was Saturday evening, May 22, 2010. A few minutes earlier, caught down a dead-end road with a snake’s nest of tornadoes breathing down our neck, we had taken last-ditch, evasive action by bailing south down the fence line, and finally, cut off by standing water, out into the field until we could go no farther. Then we braced ourselves and rode out the storm.

It was the closest call I can imagine experiencing without going airborne. A funnel materialized right in our midst, barely missing one of the vehicles. Rear-flank downdraft winds in the neighborhood of 100 mph blasted us. But in the end the storm moved off, having destroyed an old barn north of where the road had dead-ended but leaving us none the worse.

Except that now we were stuck in a rain-soaked, flooded field. And a new set of problems began to emerge.

Most of the guys in the other vehicles were people whom I had never or only recently met, but whose names I was well acquainted with. Two of them, Bart Comstock and Mike Umscheid, became the heroes of the day–the only guys who managed to make it out of that morass with their vehicles and subsequently pushed themselves well beyond exhaustion to make sure that every last man-Jack of the rest of us was accounted for and found lodging for the night.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that I probably don’t have all the details straight. It was a complex scenario, and to this day I still don’t know who all was involved. To the best of my understanding, though, Bart notified local authorities that a bunch of chasers were stuck out in a field, and the authorities notified the property owner, and the property owner was majorly pissed.

Back in the field, the first news we got–in our vehicle, anyway–was that three tractors were on the way to pull us out. By this time, the sun had set and it was dark, with lightning from other storms in the area flickering all around. I didn’t relish the thought of spending the rest of the night out in the middle of nowhere, so I was glad to hear that help was on the way. But that hope soon got dashed when we learned that the farmer was mad as hell at us and had no intention of helping us out, or, for that matter, of letting us leave.

This just flat-out blew my mind. From my perspective at that point, the man had damn near gotten us killed by plowing over our escape route, and now he was angry at us for fleeing across his field in order to preserve our lives. What were we supposed to do, sit there and let the tornadoes hit us? If we hadn’t taken the action that we did, chances were good that we’d have wound up on his property anyway as a bunch of crumpled vehicles and injured or dead chasers. It amazed me that anyone would have such little regard for human lives.

Those were my thoughts at the time. In retrospect, I think the farmer simply didn’t understand what we had been up against, any more than I and my fellow chasers understood what he was up against. Seeing through another person’s eyes doesn’t come easily. We are hampered by the sheer force of our own perspective. We take limited information, process it through the filter of personal experience, and draw swift conclusions colored by self-interest without considering what other pieces of the puzzle may exist.

This particular puzzle was a large one and I’ll never know all the pieces that were involved. I just know there were a lot.

There were us chasers who, having survived the tornadoes, found that our ordeal was far from over. There was the farmer, who had just gotten word that a bunch of crazy storm chasers were stuck out in his field after driving across his newly planted wheat. There was a local sheriff with a lot on his plate after a large tornado had plowed through his area, who–partly due to an infuriating experience with a storm chaser earlier in the evening–used his authority in a way that, in my opinion, tarnished his badge.

There were also some drunken farmers who, as I understand it, tore an antenna off one of the chasers’ vehicles and tried to pick a fight with its owner. There were other locals who showed understanding, goodwill, and helpfulness toward both the farmer and the chasers. There was one from our number who got arrested on the pretext of a ridiculous charge, and there were the deputies who treated him with courtesy and interest during his brief detention at the Ipswich jail. There were lots of people, each with a story to tell and each bringing a unique point of view to the mix.

It’s never wise to jump to conclusions in such cases. It takes time for details to filter in and the big picture to emerge, or at least a better view of it than a person is likely to get at first glance.

Thanks to Bart and Mike, all of us eventually made it out of the field that night. We had to leave the vehicles behind, but there’s a point where nothing else can be done and all a body wants is to get some rest. Through a mix-up I won’t even try to explain, I wound up separated from my group and found myself trudging across the field with Ben Holcomb, Adam Lucio, and Danny Neal. Lugging as much of our belongings with us as we could, we walked along the fence line–now a slippery mud pit strewn with intermittent post holes–up to the road. A pickup truck was waiting there. We threw our stuff into the back and clambered aboard.

The driver of the truck turned out to be the land owner. Whatever his mood may have been, he was decent enough to give us a ride partway up the road. At that point, we were delayed by a bottleneck farther up, so we got a chance to talk with the farmer and with another of his neighbors who walked up to the vehicle.

Ben and Adam did a good job of engaging these guys. I was in no conversational mood myself, but I listened and heard enough to conclude that this had been a terrible spring for South Dakota farmers. A massive amount of El Nino rains had flooded large swaths of cropland, delaying or altogether scuttling planting in some sections. Considering how hard these folks work to make a living and what a tough deal this year was handing them, I began to understand something of how the land owner might have felt: a hellish winter, ruinous flooding, tornadoes blowing through and taking out the power grid, and now this–a bunch of crazy chasers stuck in his field after tearing through his wheat.

The farmer drove us partway back up CR 130, then left us to fend for ourselves. Fortunately, his neighbor in the pickup ahead of us was willing to give us a lift. He was a decent man, sympathetic toward both his fellow farmer and toward us. A storm spotter himself, he seemed to understand what we’d been up against. He told us that if it had been any other year, we’d have had no problem, but that this year, many side roads in the area were impassable due to the rain.

The man dropped Ben, Adam, Danny, and me off at a Shell station in Ipswich. Power was out in the town thanks to the tornadoes, which had taken down high-tension lines back down the road in Bowdle.

I had been in touch with one of my chase partners, Bill Oosterbaan, via cell phone, and I gave him another call to find out his status. He, his brother Tom, and Mike Kovalchick were all with Bart, who had run out of gas en route to Aberdeen. Like us, they were stranded. Fortunately, Mike Umscheid had gone to get gas for them, so it was just a matter of waiting till he returned. Then Bart would drop off my buddies at a hotel and come for us.

The time now was something like 1:00, and from the sound of it, we had a few hours to kill before Bart would show up. There was nothing to do but hunker down and wait. My legs were coated with mud from trying to push out Mike’s vehicle earlier in the evening, and my tennis shoes were little more than big, wet clumps of black clay. The other guys weren’t quite such a mess as I was, but they were wearing T-shirts and it was cold out.

It was at this point that the sheriff drove up to check us out. When he learned that we were some of the storm chasers who had gotten stuck in the field, he smiled one of those smiles that tells you the person behind it is not your friend. “I’ve been looking for you guys,” he said. “I need to see your driver’s licenses.”

(To be continued.)

June 26, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: Bart Comstock, farmer, farmer's field, flooded field, Mike Umscheid, rear flank downdraft, rode out the storm, Roscoe South Dakota, sheriff, storm chasers, Tornadoes

Getting Set for a Backyard Chase

Last night’s bow echo certainly didn’t disappoint. I first spotted it in Wisconsin when it was a supercell putting down tornadoes near Milwaukee and thought, “That sucker is headed straight at us.” I watched as it hit Lake Michigan, maintaining rotation for a while but eventually morphing into a big bow echo. But what a bow echo! That northern book-end vortex really cranked as it moved inland and into the Kent County area. For a few scans of the radar, it looked like a small hurricane. Little wonder that it generated tornado warnings with a few reports of sightings by spotters and law enforcement.

But nasty a storm as it was, last night’s weather was probably just a prelude to what today, Wednesday, has in store. Veering surface winds taken into account, this could nevertheless be a tornado day for Michigan. The NAM shows a 70 knot 500 mb jet max blowing through the area, CAPE over 2,500, 70 degree dewpoints, and STPs to make a chaser happy.

Looks like it’ll be Kurt Hulst and me on this one. Bill is heading to Lansing to hang out with Ben Holcomb, and I think Mike Kovalchick is going to join them. That’s a good place to start. I’m not sure that I want to play quite so far east early in the game tomorrow, but I’m sure we’ll wind up well east of Lansing before the day is done. As of the 00Z run, it looks like the H5 will be nosing into West Michigan around 18Z, kissing an intensifying LLJ. Kurt and I had talked about setting up shop around I-96 and M-66. We’ll see what the 6Z run has to show us and play it from there.

At last, a Michigan chase with some real potential! And while I had guessed that storm motions would be in the neighborhood of 40 knots, the NAM decelerates them to a very manageable 25 knots. This could prove to be an interesting day, though I hope not a terribly impactful one. Southern Michigan has a lot of population centers, and I inevitably have mixed feelings whenever I see a big weather event shaping up for this area.

June 22, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Michigan, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes, Weather Tagged With: backyard chase, book-end vortex, bow echo, Michigan, NAM, storm motions, supercell, tornado warnings, Tornadoes

Interview with Paul and Elizabeth Huffman: Insights into a Historic Tornado Photograph

Meet Paul “Pic” Huffman and his wife, Elizabeth. A very photogenic couple, wouldn’t you say? And, I might add, a lovely one–two very nice, warm people who welcomed me into their house near Elkhart, Indiana, yesterday for a conversation I’ve been looking forward to a long, long time.

Forty-five years ago, on the evening of April 11, 1965, Paul and Elizabeth were homeward bound on US 33 when Elizabeth spotted what looked like a column of smoke off to the west. “Look at that smoke,” she told Paul. “Something’s burning.”

“That’s not smoke,” Paul replied.

Pulling the car off onto the shoulder, he grabbed his camera out of the back seat. Then, scrambling out of the vehicle and hooking his leg around the front bumper to steady himself in the wind, Paul Huffman began snapping photos as a tornado moved across the field, broadening and intensifying on its rapid journey toward the Midway Trailer Park less than half a mile up the road.

One of Paul’s photos, taken as debris from mobile homes exploded skyward, became not only the instant icon of the second worst tornado outbreak in Midwestern history, but also what is undoubtedly the most famous tornado photograph of all time. With the emotional impact peculiar to black-and-white photography, Paul’s photo depicts twin funnels straddling US 33 like a pair of immense, black legs. It is a chilling image, instantly recognizable to anyone interested in tornado research or severe weather history.

Researching for a book I’m writing on the 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes, I’ve come across several variations of Paul’s story by different writers. The discrepancies have been enough to leave me feeling frustrated. The Huffmans’ account strikes me as integral to a book on the outbreak, and as a matter of both responsible writing and simple respect, I’ve wanted to learn the facts and offer as accurate a writeup as possible. I was delighted last year, then, to learn that Paul would be one of the featured speakers at a Palm Sunday Outbreak commemorative event at the Bristol Museum.

Of course I attended the commemoration, where I connected with my friends Pat Bowman and Debbie Watters (my two “tornado ladies”) and also met Paul and Elizabeth for the first time. It was then that I requested an interview. Now, a year-and-a-half later, I finally got the opportunity.

When I arrived at their house, the Huffmans were standing outside surveying damage to their property from the previous day’s derecho. A small tree was down, a flagpole had gotten blown over, and a lot of tree litter had filled the yard. It seemed ironic that I was meeting Paul and Elizabeth on the wings of another bad storm.

They invited me inside, and we had a great chat that covered a lot more ground than just the tornadoes. In their early 80s, the Huffmans are an engaging twosome with plenty of stories to share. Paul, who served as a reporter for the Elkhart Truth, regaled me with several accounts from back in the day, including a flyover directly over a smokestack of the newly built Cook nuclear power plant, and a humorous mishap on the roof of a quonset hut. But of course, the main focus was his experience with the Midway tornado.

I won’t go into details here because it’s been a long day and I’m tired, and besides, I haven’t had a chance to review the interview tape. But here are a few noteworthy highlights:

* Paul never saw the twin funnels when they occurred. He was too busy snapping pictures, and he saw only the rightmost funnel in his viewfinder. Not until later, when he developed his film in his darkroom at home, did he realize what an unusual image he had captured.

* Among the larger pieces of debris raining around the Huffmans’ vehicle was a car which got flung overhead and landed on the other side of the railroad tracks that parallel US 33.

* The Huffmans never heard any of the tornado forecasts that were broadcast that day. But Paul, working outdoors earlier in that balmy afternoon sunshine, sensed that bad weather was on the way and mentioned it to Elizabeth.

* Ted Fujita interviewed the Huffmans at their house. Paul said that during his visit, Fujita seemed, oddly enough, to be more interested in Saint Elmo’s fire than in the tornado.

Paul’s overall work as a photojournalist won him a number of awards, but I’m sure that he and Elizabeth would agree that it was his one remarkable, serendipitous photograph of “The Twins” that gained him fame, if not necessarily fortune. It is strange to think how an ordinary, down-to-earth man can find himself in the right place at the right time, doing what he was designed to do–in Paul’s case, taking photographs–and wind up having an impact that shapes lives and vocations. It’s impossible to say how many people have been affected by Paul’s powerful and horrifying photo of the Midway tornado, but I know that it has helped to inspire a few notable careers in meteorology and media, not to mention many a storm chaser. It was a treat to finally get to sit down and talk with the man who took that picture, and to enjoy him and his wife not merely for their fascinating account, but also for the fine, intelligent, humorous, hospitable people that they are.

June 19, 2010 by Robert Hartig

Filed Under: Life, Storm Chasing, Tornadoes Tagged With: 1965 Palm Sunday Tornadoes, bad storm, debris, famous tornado photograph, historic tornado photograph, Midway Trailer Park, Paul Huffman, second worst tornado outbreak, severe weather history, tornado research, twin funnels