Preliminary look at the first full day in the Plains, April 12th.

This is called "Dreamcasting".  Looking at models that are far out in the meteorological future.  I usually do not look more than five days out but with a trip Kelly and I have been planning for months, I just cannot help myself!!

Certainly in planning a trip to go storm chasing, the one thing you cannot plan is the weather.  People have asked us, "Where are you going?"  The best answer we can offer is, "We don't know.  Somewhere in the Plains."  So now that we are only two weeks out, we can start planning our daily target areas.  But we will not really be able to pin point our target areas until the immediate days before.  So therefore, no hotel reservations will ever be made!

I pulled this image from Twisterdata.com this morning.  It shows a low over SW Kansas / SE Colorado.

The lifted index tells us how unstable of an environment we have.  Here, our April 12th target area in Kansas, shows a lifted index of -6.  This tells me that thunderstorms are likely with some reaching sever limits. 

Another component of severe weather is moisture.  This shows the amount of precipitable moisture that the atmosphere contains.  In this forecast it will hold a little over and inch.

In order to get thunderstorms to rotate, which will assist in developing possible supercells and tornadoes, we need shear.  This depicts the surface level winds and the winds.  Surface winds over northern Kansas are coming from the east and the upper level winds are coming in from the SSW.

All in all I am quickly learning the models and what part they play in storm prediction.  At this time range anything could happen.  We may have sunny weather or we may have conditions more favorable for significant severe weather development. 

I will continue to review the models to get a more firm idea where we want to target on the days of our trip.  Certainly three full days in the Plains will not give us much room for error. 

The Beast's Shake Down Run

On Thursday, the 11th of April, Kelly and I ran our first unofficial chase together. It was a shake down run for the Chase Beast for the 2010 season. Also it was time to get Kelly acclimated to something other than arm chair chasing!


The day promised some pop up showers and possible storms. We are within the 2% risk for tornadoes as well. We started by sitting a while watching the radar and noted a line of developing showers heading north along Rt 59 from I-55. These were developing pretty quickly so we set our target and headed off for the "Chase". These showers were developing pretty quickly and training up Rt 59 through Plainfield. As they reached Plainfield they started to dissipate but still gave us some awesome photo opportunities. We spent a little time watching the system pass from a cemetery on 127th which gave us a great vantage point and another potential spotting location!


Unfortunately, I had to head off to work for about an hour for a meeting. While there Kelly watched the storms and the radar. Luckily nothing really developed during that time so we didn't miss much. After I got out we headed off to eat and then back out for further shake down.

Before eating we noticed this one cell over Byron that just kept blowing up over the same spot and sending its weather to the north like it was a smoke stack. I was interested but did not know if it would be worth the hour drive to get there. But we headed west anyway.


When we got near Oswego on Rt 30 there was a lone cloud that looked like a small cell with a wall cloud, but it wasn't. It was just how the cloud was shaped. It gave us some great photo opportunities and we shot up several pics of the crepuscular rays. It was beautiful!!


We headed up Rt 30 and into Sugar Grove. We were keeping our eye on three cells progressing northward over LaSalle County into DeKalb. Even though they were nothing we targeted them for the practice. Shortly we ended up on a highway access road just south of I-88 on Dauberman Rd. We set up camp there.


We were there for a couple of hours and shot some video and a lot of photos. We watched one cell form and collapse before hitting a mature state. We then watched another low topped cell form and stay intact for over 30 minutes as it lumbered along to the north.

We hung around until close to 8:00 updating Facebook and just having a good time just sitting there out in the middle of nowhere. It was a chance for Kelly to get use to the chase and a chance for us to bond more. We are both very excited and looking forward to our trip to the Plains for some real chasing starting April 11th. We plan on taking as many runs like this before hand to ensure the equipment is tip-top.

Stay tuned for regular blogs coming up! Especially during our trip, April 11 through the 15th!!