After 1,200 miles and a busted chase in northern Missouri and southwest Iowa, I returned home at 2:30 in the morning. Why on earth, you may wonder, would I travel all that way to watch storms that never did more than produce weak wall clouds and a bit of hail? What madness possessed me and my chase partner, Bill Oosterbaan, to go storm chasing this late in the year anyway?

For one thing, the setup actually looked promising on paper. You can read all about it in my previous post, but the long and short of it was, the right ingredients looked to be in

place. For another thing, look: it’s the end of October, and in view of the fact that I’m probably not going to see another chaseworthy setup within a day’s drive for the next four or five months, I’ll take what I can get. I grasped at a slimmer straw than yesterday’s for my first chase of 2010, and now, at the end of the year, it was nice just to get out, hit the open road one last time with my long-time chase buddy, Bill, and take whatever came our way.

I might add that, had we actually gotten a tornado or two, Bill and I would have looked like storm chasing geniuses, the guys who score on a day when other chasers stay home. Talk about my status as a chaser going up! “How did you know?” everyone would ask. I’d just smile sagely. “Instinct,” I’d reply. “You get to where you can just sense it in your gut.”

Excuse me, I seem to have been dreaming. As I was about to say, dropping south out of Des Moines down I-35, we headed toward a small convective cluster in northwest Missouri near Maryville that was trying to get going south of a weak warm front. The shear was present to help these storms organize and you could see them doing their best, but  evidently the instability

just wasn’t enough to really inspire them. Firing toward the end of peak heating with rapidly waning insolation, the storms may have choked off the CAPE with their own shadows. Maybe a little more moisture would have done the trick, maybe a little better heating, but whatever the case, the storms never offered much more than some weak wall clouds and a bit of hail.

Our first storm actually looked promising for a minute, exhibiting a decent wall cloud that

looked like it actually might intensify. But that never happened. What we were left with for our long drive was an enjoyable afternoon and evening roaming through the hilly, autumnal landscape of Missouri and Iowa, doing one of the things we both love best–following the sky, chasing the clouds.