Twisters

Yesterday was the first time I’ve gone storm chasing that I actually got to see a tornado. And not only one, but two tornados that were on the ground plus four funnels that didn’t hit the ground.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always loved storms. I can’t remember a single time I’ve been scared of one, and even the times when there was a bad storm and my parents were freaking out (as parents are sometimes prone to doing), I always wanted to see it and be out in it.

About five years ago my dad, who has been a bit of an amateur meteorologist for as long as I can remember, got his training and became a SkyWarn spotter. SkyWarn is the group of people who are actually trained to spot and report on severe storms, floods, tornados and things like that.

I didn’t really have any plans yesterday and when my dad called and asked if I wanted to drive down to Iowa with him to chase some storms, I was a bit apprehensive. The thought of spending hours alone in his Jeep (which has been equipped with three different radios, GPS, a web cam, some flashing lights, and live satellite and radar) wasn’t entirely appealing, but I decided to go. My youngest brother, who is 11, also came along which was good because it meant no “deep” conversations.

About 25 miles north of Des Moines we stopped at a truck stop to check out the sky. We were right under the division of where the cooler air in the north was divided from the warmer air to the south. In a way it looked like someone had taken a huge eraser and carved a line of clear through the clouds. To the north were the lines and lines of puffy cumulus clouds, and to the south were all the thunderheads building up.

We got to the west side of the city around 5:30 PM and got gas, checked the radar, and he called a friend of his back up here in Minneapolis who is a storm predictor (but not a psychic).

According to the radar, the largest cells of storms were way out by Omaha, and the ones near us looked rather small in comparison to the ones farther west. But we had to work with what we had, and so we drove about 25 miles southwest of Des Moines to get positioned to watch the sky.

When you are in SkyWarn training (which I’ve had, but haven’t kept current) there are three major rules they teach you when chasing a storm. One, always try to stay to the southeast side of the storm because that is where you will have the greatest visibility of any tornados that may come out of it because there usually isn’t much rain on that side to obscure your view. Two, never chase a storm at night. You can’t chase what you can’t see, and in chasing one in the dark it’s very possible to end up in a bad situation. Three, always leave yourself two escape routes.

We drove around for about 20 minutes and finally spotted a wall cloud that looked promising. We followed that one for about ten minutes but it wasn’t doing much. As we were sitting there waiting to see if anything was going to come out of it we looked a little farther off to the west and saw another wall cloud that looked like it had a funnel trying to come down, so we took off after that one.

The funnel kept going up and down a little as we approached, like it was a fat man trying to decide if he wanted to step onto a lake of thin ice. It got all the way to the ground when we were about a mile away.

My dad got on his radio and called it in to the National Weather Service (and he was totally cheesing that he got to be the first one to call it in, which meant that his radio callsign got posted on the tornado report). We sat and watched as it ate through some fields and trees and stuff. It didn’t look like it hit any structures, but it was kind of hard to tell.

That one finally fizzled and so we followed that cell for forty minutes or so to see if it was going to build and come down again, but it didn’t. We took another look at the radar and saw another system building a little northeast of us and we went after that one.

On the way to the second one we took a bit of a detour because we saw a funnel coming down out of another cell. We watched it but it never touched down. Then another one came down a little, then went back up. It kept toying with us for a while but we eventually resumed our course to our previously designated storm cell.

By this time the daylight was fading pretty fast and when we got up to the next storm, the tornado was already on the ground. The street was lined with squad cars, fire trucks, and lots of people just sitting there watching the thing snake and dance as it tore stuff up.

We stopped to eat at the Flying J, and were trying to plan a way to get back home because the storms were going right over I-35, which we had to go on. After about 10 minutes on the road we pulled off because it was nearly impossible to see the road, and the radar was showing a hook echo (which is a possible tornado) right about where we were at. We didn’t see any tornado (although it WAS kind of dark since it was 11:00PM), but there was quite the lightning show.

Anyhow, that was my day. We got back home around 3:45 AM this morning. It took a bit longer to get back because it was raining and storming most of the way back, and also because when we were coming through Minneapolis some drunk teenage chick with a car full of friends decided to ram a median and my dad stopped to see if anyone needed first aid (actually, I was driving so I stopped because he said to, and me and my brother sat in the Jeep and ripped on them for being stupid while he went to see if they were ok).

I still think storms rock. I really can’t say why. Maybe it’s the amount of power that it takes to make a storm, and the amount of power that a storm produces. Maybe I’m just a danger junkie. But if I win the lottery, I’m gonna be spending a lot of time chasing these things.