JamesCaruso
Staff member
Finally getting around to posting some reports from my 2022 storm chasing vacation. We arrived in Denver on Saturday, May 21, greeted by the sight of 6-9 inches of snow that had fallen throughout the I-25 corridor overnight. With temperatures in the 30s, there would be no chasing this weekend, but I had been eyeing Monday 5/23 for a few days, initially thinking southeast NM. We made our way down to Colorado Springs on Saturday, spending some time at Garden of the Gods (I had been there before, but seeing it after a snowfall was a new experience) and to Amarillo by Sunday night. Amarillo was probably a bit out of the way, but it was my son's first storm chasing vacation with me, and I wanted to bring him through the place where it all started for me (I first began chasing in 1996, with Marty Feely's Whirlwind Tours, which began its tours in Amarillo).
Starting out from Amarillo on Monday morning May 23, my initial target was Seminole. At Seagraves (between Brownfield and Seminole), I decided to retreat north to Brownfield. Showers popped up right over us, but these (and other storms south) just petered out. Radar showed that better storms were moving into the southwestern TX panhandle. These were severe-warned, but 60 miles away; I am typically biased toward holding to a target and not gallivanting off toward the first good storm when it's that far away. Then other storms developed to the south of those, which I knew would choke off the older ones to their immediate north. So now these newer, more southern storms were a little closer to me. As it was becoming apparent that the atmosphere just wasn't going to get it done in the Brownfield area, we went north after these other storms.
What was to become the Morton tornadic supercell went severe as we approached. On reflectivity, I saw some hail start to wrap around, indicating rotation, and sure enough a TOR warning was soon issued. As it turned out, the first TOR report was just 2 minutes after the TOR warning issuance time. Here is a radar image showing our approach, accompanied by a picture taken just a few minutes later. The tornado had to be on the ground at this point, but as you can see it is not visible in the dust and precipitation.
What was visible of the base did not look all that impressive upon approach. We got out of the car at a position due south and now had visibility of the tornado:
This had to be one of the oddest "tornado moments" of my chasing career. Being my first chase since last year, having just spent a weekend in 30-degree weather with fresh snow on the ground, on the first day of moisture return without much of a tornado risk, I almost couldn't process that I was seeing a tornado, especially one that had become this wide, this quickly. I almost didn't want to believe it was a tornado and almost thought it was just a mass of rain that may or may not have had a tornado in it. My son wasn't even sure he was seeing a tornado - not that he had ever seen one in-person before, but usually tornados are pretty obvious even when it's your first one. I was so fixated on the image at the ground that I wasn't even taking notice of the bigger picture, which in retrospect as viewed in the full frame shown above makes it pretty obvious to the point of what I just typed probably sounding moronic. Although in fairness I had arrived on the scene a minute or so before the picture was taken, and it's possible it was less clear just moments before, due to the effects of the extensive dust that made line of sight critical and resulted in rapid morphing of the scene (such as in the picture on approach, before the one above, which was from just minutes earlier). Having gotten my son to his first tornado on his first-ever day of chasing, there was a lot of emotion that probably affected my interpretation of what I was seeing - I almost couldn't believe it. And the overall lack of anticipation of a tornado on this marginal day, and not seeing it form, probably added to my overall muddled thought processes at the time. All of these crazy thoughts somewhat interfered with being in a state of mindfulness relative to the tornado itself, as did the realization that I had to quickly get north and east or I was going to lose it. But it was indeed a special moment with my son, and I took his picture and some video in front of his first tornado to memorialize it for him.
We never had visibility on the tornado again, despite being in fairly good position east of it. The dust completely obscured any visibility of the ground. The velocity image seems to suggest two areas of rotation. The next photo is about 20 minutes after the following radar image, but we had been in the same spot most of the time as the storm moved southeast toward us.
Despite having no visibility of the tornado (if it was even still on the ground at this point), the strong blowing dust made for an intense experience. We were in inflow just about the entire evening. As the storm got closer, at some point we had to move south and the inflow became even stronger, taking visibility down to near zero.
We went east at our next opportunity. It then appeared there was new development to the south so we went south again - and again experienced zero visibility in the blowing dust - and then east from there. We probably were in better position relative to the base at some point before we turned east, but in all that dust it just didn't make sense to stop until we were out of it. We were in RFD briefly while on the east road, probably the only time all day that we weren't in inflow.
By now we were starting to lose daylight. I could see the edges of the banding / "stack of plates" on the supercell, so with daylight waning I decided to blast out ahead of it and give my son a look at supercell structure; he was impressed with that, as well as the lightning.
Overall a great day and a phenomenal first chase with my son. He expressed his excitement for what he was seeing, and about how good it was to be together out there and finally see and experience what I had talked about all those years. A particularly sentimental moment was when we saw a DOW pass, and I said to him, "Remember when I bought you that Matchbox radar truck when you were little, and would read you storm chasing books? And now we are actually here together!"
We stayed in Lubbock for the night. It was 10:30 and hard to find a place open, until we found a place called BJs, where I had a burger and my son ordered ribs.
Starting out from Amarillo on Monday morning May 23, my initial target was Seminole. At Seagraves (between Brownfield and Seminole), I decided to retreat north to Brownfield. Showers popped up right over us, but these (and other storms south) just petered out. Radar showed that better storms were moving into the southwestern TX panhandle. These were severe-warned, but 60 miles away; I am typically biased toward holding to a target and not gallivanting off toward the first good storm when it's that far away. Then other storms developed to the south of those, which I knew would choke off the older ones to their immediate north. So now these newer, more southern storms were a little closer to me. As it was becoming apparent that the atmosphere just wasn't going to get it done in the Brownfield area, we went north after these other storms.
What was to become the Morton tornadic supercell went severe as we approached. On reflectivity, I saw some hail start to wrap around, indicating rotation, and sure enough a TOR warning was soon issued. As it turned out, the first TOR report was just 2 minutes after the TOR warning issuance time. Here is a radar image showing our approach, accompanied by a picture taken just a few minutes later. The tornado had to be on the ground at this point, but as you can see it is not visible in the dust and precipitation.
What was visible of the base did not look all that impressive upon approach. We got out of the car at a position due south and now had visibility of the tornado:
This had to be one of the oddest "tornado moments" of my chasing career. Being my first chase since last year, having just spent a weekend in 30-degree weather with fresh snow on the ground, on the first day of moisture return without much of a tornado risk, I almost couldn't process that I was seeing a tornado, especially one that had become this wide, this quickly. I almost didn't want to believe it was a tornado and almost thought it was just a mass of rain that may or may not have had a tornado in it. My son wasn't even sure he was seeing a tornado - not that he had ever seen one in-person before, but usually tornados are pretty obvious even when it's your first one. I was so fixated on the image at the ground that I wasn't even taking notice of the bigger picture, which in retrospect as viewed in the full frame shown above makes it pretty obvious to the point of what I just typed probably sounding moronic. Although in fairness I had arrived on the scene a minute or so before the picture was taken, and it's possible it was less clear just moments before, due to the effects of the extensive dust that made line of sight critical and resulted in rapid morphing of the scene (such as in the picture on approach, before the one above, which was from just minutes earlier). Having gotten my son to his first tornado on his first-ever day of chasing, there was a lot of emotion that probably affected my interpretation of what I was seeing - I almost couldn't believe it. And the overall lack of anticipation of a tornado on this marginal day, and not seeing it form, probably added to my overall muddled thought processes at the time. All of these crazy thoughts somewhat interfered with being in a state of mindfulness relative to the tornado itself, as did the realization that I had to quickly get north and east or I was going to lose it. But it was indeed a special moment with my son, and I took his picture and some video in front of his first tornado to memorialize it for him.
We never had visibility on the tornado again, despite being in fairly good position east of it. The dust completely obscured any visibility of the ground. The velocity image seems to suggest two areas of rotation. The next photo is about 20 minutes after the following radar image, but we had been in the same spot most of the time as the storm moved southeast toward us.
Despite having no visibility of the tornado (if it was even still on the ground at this point), the strong blowing dust made for an intense experience. We were in inflow just about the entire evening. As the storm got closer, at some point we had to move south and the inflow became even stronger, taking visibility down to near zero.
We went east at our next opportunity. It then appeared there was new development to the south so we went south again - and again experienced zero visibility in the blowing dust - and then east from there. We probably were in better position relative to the base at some point before we turned east, but in all that dust it just didn't make sense to stop until we were out of it. We were in RFD briefly while on the east road, probably the only time all day that we weren't in inflow.
By now we were starting to lose daylight. I could see the edges of the banding / "stack of plates" on the supercell, so with daylight waning I decided to blast out ahead of it and give my son a look at supercell structure; he was impressed with that, as well as the lightning.
Overall a great day and a phenomenal first chase with my son. He expressed his excitement for what he was seeing, and about how good it was to be together out there and finally see and experience what I had talked about all those years. A particularly sentimental moment was when we saw a DOW pass, and I said to him, "Remember when I bought you that Matchbox radar truck when you were little, and would read you storm chasing books? And now we are actually here together!"
We stayed in Lubbock for the night. It was 10:30 and hard to find a place open, until we found a place called BJs, where I had a burger and my son ordered ribs.
