Storm Chase 2019

I chased with WeatherHolidays (www.weatherholidays.com) which was led by Paul Botten who is a very experienced storm chaser. This tour, unlike Plain’s chasing, is based from a fixed location (Papago Inn, Scottsdale, Phoenix, AZ). This is the Arizona tour organised to photograph the monsoon storms. I flew out to Phoenix 11 August and flew back on Thursday 22 August.

Paul Botten was lead chaser and forecaster and also drove one of the cars. Arron Hiscox who has his own tour company (See Nature’s Fury) was the other driver. The guests were:- Melvyn May, Mike Upjohn, Quentin and Maxine Hordle.

I arrived at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix and took a taxi to the hotel in Scottsdale. I then met up wih the other team members and was promptly told we were heading towards Texas as there was no prospect of monsoon storms anywhere in Phoenix for at least 4 days. So despite being exhausted I grabbed a plastic bag and threw a few things into it and we headed eastwards towards Texas. We spent Sunday night in Albuquerque, NM (Hot dog, jumping frog).

12 August 2019

We drove eastwards today into the Texas panhandle. Near Dumas, TX we chased a storm that produced some lightning as the sun set.

13 August 2019

Today the SPC has issued an enhanced warning for eastern Colorado so we targeted Burlington.

Here are some of the sights that we were met with on this drive. We were even buzzed by this crop duster.

It wasn’t long before we found a storm that became tornado warned.

It wasn’t long before the storm produced a large cone tornado located near the town of Joes, CO. We would have loved to have been closer but there was a distinct lack of roads for this.Here is a nice little gif of the formation of the first tornado.

Then we were amazed and delighted to have a second tornado form to the right of the first one – twins! (My first).Shortly after re-positioning we watched another wall cloud and saw circulation underneath evidence of a third, small, tornado.

As I mentioned above there was some great structure in the wall clouds of this storm.

Towards the end of the chase we saw a cracking roll cloud (Reed Timmer tweeted about this.

14 August 2019

Today we started in Burlington, CO. A slight risk and we drove towards NE Colorado. The first part of the day we waited in a farmer’s field where it was very hot with no shade. I managed to capture a few swallows in flight.

Once storms fired we headed towards them.

Along a mud road we came across some massive hail along the side of the road.

The largest we measured was 3″. After seeing these stones we treated this supercell with utmost respect and chased it south, avoiding the hail core!, back towards Burlington. As we skirted the east side and moved south a stunning supercell became evident.

We managed to catch a few bolts too.

 

15 August 2019

Today’s risk was in Eastern Kansas. On the way we spotted quite a bit of damage from high winds around Hays. I also saw this cool blue GT – note the large flock of birds behind it.

Around 5:30pm storms started to fire and we made our way to a vantage point just east of Alta Vista. A stunning supercell was our reward.

There’s no way this could get any better is there? WRONG! This stunning supercell had one further gift for us. It dropped a tornado right in the middle of the wall cloud. OMG!

Paul was pleased it’s fair to say!

As we re-positioned after sunset we managed to capture some nice lightning. One of our group, whilst we were shooting lightning (Mike) thought he could see another tornado illuminated by the lightning so we rushed to get a long exposure to verify or not. He was right. Another large tornado which turns out was on the ground for around 20 minutes was in progress. Had we not moved it would have been very close to us. Never mind!

We managed to grab a few lightning shots as well.

16 August 2019

We started the day in Emporia, KS and took the opportunity to start our long drive back to Arizona via a slight risk in Colorado.

Again we saw ecidence of wind damage around Hays, KS.

We managed to be close to th best storm of the day but it failed to live up to the previous days festival of tornadoes. We managed to catch a nice full rainbow, a few lightning shots – The first is a “ghostly” image!

17 August 2019

Today was a travel day. We started in Burlington, CO and ended up still in Aztec, NM with a nice meal. A few of the sights from the road on our way.

18 August 2019

Today we took a scenic drive back to Phoenix via four corners, monument valley and some Milky Way photography.

Four corners is the place where New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah meet. They really do meet in a cross.

 

 

We then stopped off at Gooseneck state park.

19 August 2019

Today was a quiet day recovering from the travels of previous days. We drove up South Mountain to catch the sunset and also to try some astro photography.

I managed to capture a couple of meteors. This first one we all saw streaking straight down the sky!

20 August 2019

Today we drove to Western New Mexico – Lordsburg for storms that never materialised. Paul, I and Mike took the chance for some astro photography after the sun went down. There was a distant storm over Mexico and we saw a number of “strange” orange lights – probably some kind of military flares.

Saw this funky car driving along the railway.

21 August 2019

Today we returned to Phoenix ready for our return to Blighty the next day. Storms were forecast in SE Arizona and we did manage to shoot some lightning. We saw a number of fires on our way the first which we believe had been started by lightning and when we stopped for some sunset shots another distant fire was evident.

And this is my unluckiest lightning shot ever. Just as I picked up the tripod which had been pointing in one direction for 15 minutes I heard the shutter. To my horror I caught the best lightning of the day with nice branches but the foreground is moving. The exposure was about 1/50sec. So how unlucky was that?

Another storm chase completed and it was epic!