Day Seventeen

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Day Sixteen

Thank goodness for late checkout.  Spent a wonderful if unexpected morning in complete oblivion in Fayetteville, GA.  Finally got to sleep around 5 am, which beats the tar out of what kids at the airport wound up doing.  Eight of us got hotel rooms earlier this morning, and they let us check out at 1:30 pm (no food since yesterday’s lunch, BTW, other than two bags of pretzels).  While I am recycling clothes, at least I feel like a human being again.

Gus is still upstairs, asleep.  He’s basically been sick for the entire trip.  He’s already threatened to hole up in his apartment until his mom comes on Saturday, and I do not blame him in the least. 

Status update: as of about 3 pm local, five of us are enjoying the hospitality of the hotel lobby (many thanks to these wonderful people), two are out with cousins in the area, and one is likely asleep.  Five of our kids got earlier flights home, and the other two spent a very miserable night in the airport—one got an hour’s sleep, and the other stayed up all night long.  The plan as of now is to get moving around 5 pm (Atlanta traffic is brutal) with the hopes of getting to the airport by 6, where we can spend (another) five hours waiting.  And the Bruins won the Stanley Cup, blowing the home ice advantage rule.

Definition of irony 1: the journey home from a storm-chasing trip is delayed due to severe thunderstorms.

Definition of irony 2: the hotel vending machine in Fayetteville, GA (outside of Atlanta) dispenses Pepsi products.

One of the students waiting at the airport has been sick, too.  Coming here was the call to make.  Apparently he contracted some kind of food poisoning. 

The airport wait was relatively uneventful, although when they announced a gate change for us we almost panicked.  The ride home was a bit bumpy, but at least the sick student made the plane ride without hurling (although he might have once before we took off). 

On the way home one of the tunes that came up was Two of Us (from Let It Be), with the chorus “we’re on our way home… we’re on our way home…we’re going home.”  I don’t think I’ll believe it until I’m yelling at Dustin and Kathy to stop yelling at each other.

Well, it’s been an eventful trip: 16 hotel rooms in 16 different cities over 16 nights, lots of meteorologically and geologically (and psychologically) interesting facets, but no tornadoes.  I hope the kids were equally impressed.  Apparently the Oswego stormchasers busted out, too.  I learned lots of things, some of which I didn’t necessarily want to know, but that’s how education goes sometimes.  While it wasn’t always easy, it was mostly a blast, but it’s enough—thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.

Day Fifteen

We started the day in Boulder at a theoretically very nice hotel (read: very expensive), which turned out to be just very expensive.  We took a quick trip to the NCAR Mesa Lab (which I refer to as Mount Olympus), where the kids finally got to see a tornado (albeit made of steam), then got back in the vans for one last time for the trip back to the airport.  We took the traditional route (US36 to 104^th Avenue to Tower to Peña Boulevard), which got us to the rental place about 10 minutes late but no worries.  Final tally: 5318 miles.

We had a while to wait, so we had a quiet lunch and headed into security, where the TSA agent was impressed with my The Whos t-shirt (yet another person who gets it, yay).  We were scheduled to fly out at 5:18 pm local, and made it out with no problems. 

Atlanta was another story, however.  They were under a severe thunderstorm watch (oh good).  We were scheduled to land at a bit past 10 pm local, and our flight to Rochester was scheduled to leave at 11 pm local.  We were forced to land in Memphis, where we spent about 45 minutes.  We got back onto the plane and flew to Atlanta hoping for a break in the weather.  Plenty of lightning from the plane.  A bow echo (another one!) rolled through the airport, delaying our landing.  When we did land, we were directed to get in line at a gate agent, not a good sign.  It would appear that we missed our connecting flight by about 15 minutes.  They also got off with 15 empty seats. 

Due to the high number in our party (15), we were rebooked on the exact same flight (11 pm) Thursday.  This led to much consternation, as you might imagine.  We trolled for hotel rooms, but as you might imagine there were none in the vicinity of the airport.  We were eventually able to find a place in Fayetteville (15 miles south of the airport).  Being in Terminal D meant that we had to walk about a mile (no airport train running) to get to the taxi line.  (I hate this airport.)  $45 later, we arrived at the hotel at 4:40 am, where I went to yet another hotel room and passed out.

Day Fourteen

Started in Hot Springs, SD, in the southern part of the Black Hills (very pretty area).  Headed west into Wyoming (FINALLY).  Lots of interesting terrain, but not much else.  This means that I finally knocked out another state—too bad it took 14 days to do so.  This makes 11 states in 14 days, and 14 different cities in which we spent the night (in order: Rapid City, SD; Aberdeen, SD; Council Bluffs, IA; Mt. Pleasant, IA; Ramsey, MN; Grand Forks, ND; Fargo, ND; Omaha, NE, Chillicothe, MO; Colby, KS; Goodland, KS; Chadron, NE; Hot Springs, SD; Boulder, CO).

Today’s destination was Rocky Mountain National Park, which is indescribably beautiful.  The weather was quiet today (for a change), but we still managed to see a lenticular cloud.  We made it to the highest point on the road (over 12K feet).  Still lots of snow in spots.  Also saw the Continental Divide, which means we’ve been to all three drainage basins (Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic). 

 
Spending the night in Boulder.  We’re planning to visit the Mesa Lab of NCAR in the morning, and then we head for the airport.  Hard to fathom, but the trip is just about over.  Lots of work, lots of driving, but lots of fun.  Nevertheless, I think all of us are ready to sleep in our own beds.  (Pictures to come.)

Day Thirteen

Clear, beautiful morning in Chadron, unlike when we arrived last night.  A crew from Texas Tech was here last night, researching outflow.  Apparently this season has been a terrible year for Plains tornadoes (unlike other parts of the country).  We’re beginning our whirlwind (so to speak) tour of the South Dakota parks (Crazy Horse, Rushmore, Minuteman, Badlands), so we’re heading north on US385 (again).

We stopped at a local branch of a large corporation to get lunch before the trip to save some time (you can probably figure out which one, they have many such branches in rural areas).  I am wearing my Gallifrey Road shirt (the one with the four Doctors walking out of the TARDIS at the zebra crossing, like Abbey Road), and one of their employees caught sight of me and said, ‘Great shirt!’  His coworkers said that he has a warped sense of humor, to which I replied that I do too.  They wondered if we were related.  I had to come all the way to Chadron, Nebraska for someone to get it. 

Speaking of, a TARDIS would certainly take the guesswork (and skill, I guess) out of all this stormchasing business.  Being able to get anywhere in the universe at any point in time would make things easier.

While I was typing this we quietly invaded South Dakota again.  If you include the states we started from and traveled through (the liberal definition), we’ve been in 10 states: in rough order: New York, Georgia, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, and Kansas.  I anticipate that we’ll get to Wyoming (yay) today or tomorrow.  Over 20% of the U.S. ‘covered’ in two weeks—wow.

Drove up US385 through Hot Springs (a very nice looking town) to the Crazy Horse Memorial.  The site used to take freewill donations, but now they charge $10 a head (we got by with $3.50 per as students).  Stayed long enough to take pictures of the ‘progress’ (it’s been a work in progress since 1948).  For some reason they’re not too hot on taking government subsidies.  Sad, as they’ve made so little progress to this point.  It will be pretty spectacular when (if) it’s done.

Mt. Rushmore was beautiful, but smaller than one would expect.  Gorgeous, nevertheless (see pics).

To prove we’re really just tourists, we stopped in Wall (and of course, Wall Drug).  It’s everything you expect it to be, but the sheer magnitude is jaw-dropping.  It was a very quick stop (~15 minutes), so we didn’t see a whole lot of it.  Still interesting, though—kind of like the Smithsonian, you can’t see it all in one day.  Maybe you can, but it would be a very long day.  I can honestly say that my life is better for having stopped here.  And yes, there is still a drug store here.

From Wall Drug we visited the site of an old Minuteman missile silo (Delta-09).  Very interesting—it was an unmanned silo, the control room was about 15 miles down the road.  You can visit this site as well, but you need reservations.  That would have been really cool to see.

Next stop was Badlands National Park.  All I can say is wow.  I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, but this was pretty spectacular.  Pictures are worth more than 1000 words in this case.  There were some storms going on in the distance as well, so there are pictures of those too.

In the Badlands gift shop they were selling the little Golden weather book, much like the one I had as a kid.  The cover is different, but the content hasn’t changed since the early 1970s (old radar and satellite references, observations in SA instead of METAR format, etc.).  Almost touching, really.

We ran into a minor issue regarding our lodging for the evening.  We were planning to drive back to Chadron, making our way to Estes Park on Tuesday to see Rocky Mountain National Park, but the hotel we stayed in last night was booked (whoa).  While driving back toward Rapid City, we expanded our horizons to see if there were rooms in Lusk, Wyoming (no) and Hot Springs, South Dakota (yes).  We figured that if worse came to worse we could stay in Rapid City again (and hope that no one was bitten by anything again).  While trying to figure out what was going on (thanks again, McDonalds), we noticed that to the southwest of town a cell had an interesting feature.  Gus and I decided it was a supercell with a wall cloud!  (There were also some mammatus clouds overhead again.)  We set up the mobile monitoring and decided to give chase.  Sadly, the wall cloud petered out (it never really appeared to rotate).  We determined that a bow echo developing behind the supercell laid down an outflow boundary and the cold air choked off the warm inflow to the supercell.  Another damn bow echo!  The bow did put down some gusty winds and put on one hell of a lightning show (again).

So here we are in Hot Springs, SD.  The town seems to roll up the sidewalks at night, so Gus and I wound up ordering a pizza from the place with the familiar red roof (Authentic Mexican Food).  Unfortunately, he’s back under the weather again.  Fortunately, this schedule is coming to an end soon. 

Overall, though, what a great day for pictures.  It’s funny that on a day we weren’t intending to chase we come the closest to actually seeing a tornado.  (More pics to come.)

Day Twelve

Woke to a cool, cloudy morning in Goodland, KS.  We’re hoping the stratus deck left over from yesterday’s convection breaks soon or it will be a no-go kind of day.  We’re on our way to North Platte, NE, in the hopes of seeing discrete cells.  As we’ve seen so far, chasing clusters and lines is not a lot of fun, and could even be hazardous to one’s health.  The SPC is thinking the western Dakotas and eastern Montana for a slight risk, but a check of the WRF model run out of NSSL shows potential discrete cells in western Nebraska, and it was dead on with the Colorado tornado yesterday.

Just to recap, we’ve seen HP supercells, MCSs in the form of lines and clusters, and a bow echo on this trip.  We’ve also seen a fox, several deer, and a pheasant.  We also gave a bird a serious headache (if not outright killed it) as he ran into our windscreen.  We’re still hopeful for a LP supercell (the UFO), but moisture has been somewhat abundant.

Made it into Nebraska (again) and the cloud deck has broken, and we have a few fair-weather cumulus (cumulus humilus) developing.  Our former student (Caitlin) is out chasing again today.  Not sure whether we’ll meet up or not, as we’ve not had a lot of success previously.  Plan at the moment is to head north on Nebraska 61 to Ogallala, then head east to North Platte.

Things are changing.  SPC is considering a tornado watch for the Nebraska Panhandle north through the western Dakotas, so it looks like we’ll be taking that left turn at Ogallala (instead of east toward North Platte).  Concern is the cap in the Panhandle (undular nature of the clouds, low, flat-topped Cu), but there is little if any CIN to be seen.

We’ll be spending the night in Chadron, Nebraska.  How places like this can charge more than $100 a night on a Sunday is beyond me.   

A number of Midwest gas stations charge more for regular unleaded than for plus or super.  This might seem strange at first, but the higher octane gases apparently have ethanol in them, which lowers the price per gallon.

Made it to Bridgeport, Nebraska, home of the tractor junkyards (see pics).  Now headed north to Alliance, but a meso discussion just got issued for the Nebraska Panhandle (where we are) south to northeastern Colorado.  It’s discussing the potential for high-based storms with little possibility of tornadoes (too dry in the sub-cloud layer).  We’ll probably stop there and figure out our next move.

Moved north out of Alliance and turned west past Hemingford and stopped near the intersection of Nebraska 2 and 71 to wait for a storm to pass just to our north.  Got some great shots of the cloud and a dry microburst, as well as a very nicely developed storm about 60 miles to the south.  We then headed east again on Nebraska 2 to wait for the storm to pass.  Got to see the shelf cloud and some serious lightning, some close enough that I was nervous for people standing outside (and got blitzed by mosquitos).  Also got to see the inflow into the back (west) side of the cloud, which was unusual.  We got our LP supercell!

We kept heading east on 2 and got to the intersection of Nebraska 385, which would take us to Chadron (our home for the evening).  Looking at the radar, we had a choice of heading south and back toward Alliance to see if storms to the south would be worth chasing.  After a fashion (and about 20 minutes), we decided the storms were weakening and should head for home.  On the way we saw the sun setting behind a beautiful Cb with crepuscular rays (which caused us to stop and take pictures).  Later on the way a look in the rear-view mirror showed a beautifully lit Cb—again, picture time.  To cap an already spectacular day off, we got treated to a spectacular lightning display.  While standing outside of the hotel watching it, we heard a siren go off—not possible!  Turned out to be a signal calling the fire department to duty.

Over 330 miles driven today.  All in all, a phenomenal day, the perfect way to end the chasing part of the trip.  No tornadoes spotted, but still a great trip.  The next two days will be spent at the South Dakota and Colorado parks.  Good night. 

Day Eleven

The day started in Colby, Kansas, in the western part of the state.  It looks like things might fire up late in the day, but it was questionable, so we were wondering if we should head north to be in better position to chase on Sunday (likely Nebraska), or should we try to see if things pop around here.

After much debate, we decided to stick close.  We headed south toward Oakley, the home of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley.  Spent some time in the Fick Museum (pics below), which featured fossils and various other exhibits.  The kids spent some time on the playground, while Gus investigated some development. 

After seeing the Buffalo Bill statue and a quick gas station hamburger (better than you’d expect), we headed even further south toward developing storms.  The problem with this area is that the major roads are few and far between, with very few cross streets that aren’t made of dirt or gravel.  We found ourselves in a position where we would not be able to get behind the storms like we wanted, so we drove to the nearest town (Syracuse, KS) and looked for shelter.  We found an empty car wash with two bays, so we put the vans in them and waited.   

We beat the storm by about 10 or 15 minutes.  We experienced the strong inflow, increasing lightning (including some CGs), and the gust front, which dropped the temperature by at least 20F.  The wind picked up significantly (30+ mph easily), and then the sideways rain kicked in.  We even got pea-sized hail.  Amazing that we played chicken with a bow echo and won.

After it let up, we drove back north on Kansas 27 through Tribune (where Arnold’s bully from Diff’rent Strokes apparently has a store) and Sharon Springs (where they have our movie theatre) pics below) to land in Goodland, KS, which is a very small town spread out over a large area.  Saw some great clouds from the hotel parking lot (see pics).  An early briefing and a quick dinner and debriefing with Gustavo and the night is over.  Looks like we’re heading to Nebraska again for our last potential chase day.  We’re planning to do the South Dakota parks on Monday and hopefully get to Wyoming that evening, and then drive to Colorado on Tuesday for Rocky Mountain National Park and a Wednesday departure.  We shall see.

Dustin asked me what my favorite part of the trip was…hard to say, really.  Seeing storms develop in their environment in real-time is pretty spectacular, but so is seeing that the things I teach in class or learned in texts or journal articles actually works in the real atmosphere.  There’s also the fact that even though I’d been to all the states we’ve been to (so far), I’ve seen areas of the states I’ve not been to yet.  In other words, it’s all good.

 

BTW…we crested 4K miles today.