Stuck In The Mud (Or, Storm Chasing Retrospection)

And I thought WE had a couple of close calls near Wakita, Oklahoma...

About six weeks removed from my first storm chasing expedition, I've observed this tornado season with far closer interest than years past -- and I've been pretty damn interested every year since I was 12. The reasons are many: (1) I know where to look for and how to interpret "inside" information (i.e., not The Weather Channel), (2) I'm now friends on Facebook with several chasers, and (3) it was a pretty active season anyway.

One of the more impressive videos I've seen came from a late-May outbreak in South Dakota. You probably saw this on the news, but Reed Timmer and Co. at tornadovideos.net were there to get some amazing shots:



One story I followed vicariously from afar on Facebook makes my heart-thumping chase look like a walk in a boring, tornadoless park. Last Saturday, while I was moving to a new apartment (I kinda would rather have been chasing), the tour guides from my chase (Olivier "Klipsi" Steiger and Dave Holder) and their last tour group navigated their way into the path of a supercell near Concordia, Kansas.

I've heard that the road network in central and western Kansas is less than ideal, forcing chasers to take the back roads, where not a trace of asphalt nor concrete can be found: it's ALL dirt. Rough, dusty roads are difficult enough to navigate. Add torrential rains to the mix, and you get loads of mud. Not friendly to big, bumbling vehicles like our old tour van.

I'm sure I'm leaving out details (I'm going by Klipsi's wall posts on Facebook), but this is what I gathered. After finding themselves directly in the path of a pretty substantial twister about a half-mile away, road conditions deteriorated underneath them, as they found themselves inundated in 3-5 inches of mud, completely immobile. Just how close were they? Well, their position is the white dot in the following images from radar:


See that giant hook at the southwest corner? That's where the tornado was. Even more clearly:


Image credits: Olivier Steiger, http://www.klipsi.ch
See the adjacent bright red and bright green spots? That's called a "velocity couplet", a clear sign of very strong rotation. Again, the white dot...not so far away.

At the last moment, they abandoned the van and hopped onto a passing truck, out of harm's way, and later returned to find the van relatively unharmed. But MAN, what a rush that must've been.

Now, as I've said before, this Klipsi dude's seen a lot and has lived through some pretty sticky situations. But his untouched wall post accompanying the latter radar image says it all: "and here is the velocity... couplet, anyone ? again, white ring is our stuck-in-mud position.... hahahahahahahahahahhahahahahha.... ABANDON VAN, NOW !"

From all of this, in addition to my own experiences, I draw a single conclusion: I AM SO THERE NEXT YEAR. Because sitting in front of a computer in an office is all well and good...but at some point it really starts to feel like you're stuck in the mud.


"Never. Stop. Chasing." -- Reed Timmer