Now that Sunday’s brouhaha in Tornado Alley is over and done, the big question seems to be, where were all the tornadoes? The turnout was there, the fans were waiting, but besides the rope and the wedge/multivortex/stovepipe that my buddies Bill and Tom witnessed near Crawford, Oklahoma, in company with a multitude of other chasers, there just wasn’t anything to make postcards out of. The big show never showed. Even the lone supercell that wandered north out of Texas into Oklahoma’s higher helicities never produced, despite its lack of competition. Oh, there were a couple of twisters in Kansas, and with a tally of four, Iowa had the most reports of all. Ironically, it wasn’t even in the PDS high risk area.
This is by no means to criticize the crew at the SPC; those are some highly adept meteorological minds, the finest in the world. No, it’s just to muse at the vagaries of the weather. Rudimentary as my own forecasting skills are, I’ve nevertheless come to realize that no matter how good a forecaster one becomes, the weather is still the weather. Capricious. Subject to subtleties that no one gives weight to until after the fact. The butterfly beats its wings and a tornado fires up in Texas–or a seemingly volatile setup falls apart.
Judging from the YouTube videos and the photos posted on Stormtrack, a lot of people managed to be in the right place at the right time for the one storm in Oklahoma that did produce a couple very photogenic tornadoes. But the event was a far cry from high-risk mayhem.
Guess I can’t feel bad about that, since I was sitting at home nursing a chest cold while my mates were out there roaming the Plains. The cold now seems finally poised to start breaking up, and hopefully in another day or two I’ll feel halfway human again. It’s just as well that I get this nonsense out of the way now, so I’m up to snuff physically in a couple weeks when my buds and I head out to the Alley for an extended tour. I hope that by then, there won’t be any lack of the right ingredients in the atmospheric brew to make the trip worthwhile.
