Best Chase (since I didn't post in the best chase thread): May 29th
The Jamestown/Belleville cell, definitely. Saw a little bit of everything that day, including the backlit multiple-vortex tornado I’d always longed to see... Which later became a wedge... Closely followed by a gorgeous white anticyclonic tornado, that we managed to get within 100 yards of, maybe closer... Several more tubes after that... Then awesome storm structure near dark – what a striated HP monster that cell became! Ended the day with a mammatus display that caught the last of the setting sun. Easily one of my best days ever as a chaser.
Second Best Chase, but also one of the more frustrating: May 12th
Some of the best storm structure I’ve ever seen, rotation everywhere you looked... But we stayed with the northern storm too long, and got caught on the wrong side of the roadblock at Attica, thus missing the best tornados of the day. We did get a nice photogenic cone early on, though... And later a white stovepipe, as the light began to fade... And of course the storm structure was simply amazing all day long. At one point there were no less than four separate rotating wall clouds in view! Interesting stuff was happening everywhere, all around us... How I wish I could have somehow captured and preserved this storm, to be examined and explored later in detail, at my leisure. If only!! Ah, well. Wonders definitely abounded this day, and the truth is that I’m happy enough to have seen as much of it as I did. The frustration factor was definitely there (that damn roadblock!) but what we did see was so good it cancelled out a lot of the annoyance over the even better stuff that we missed.
Most Frustrating Chase: a tie between May 21th and May 22st.
On the 21st we were on the storm that eventually produced the damaging Bradgate, Iowa tornado. We were on this cell right from initiation, and the young storm seemed to show great promise, indeed it did. But after a long chase across northwest Iowa, the cell appeared to weaken considerably, eventually becoming so obviously outflowish that we decided to blow it off completely and blast west instead. Big mistake! Twenty minutes later, we heard that the cell was once again T-warned. And almost immediately after that, the tornado reports began to come in... In excruciating detail. To add insult to injury, a cell produces a tornado right at our original target of Norfolk, Nebraska – quite out of our reach after the Iowa chase. We did, just barely, manage to catch the madly rotating Sioux City cell as it crossed the river near dark, but saw nothing interesting... And then on the drive south, we had some very intense moments playing cat and mouse with a whole line of nighttime tornadic storms. Darkness in a small NE town, the sirens blaring, nowhere to run... Half hoping for a tornado, half praying there won’t be one... Ominous lowering passing right in front of us, close enough to be illuminated by our headlights... An unforgettable experience, to be sure. A fun day, actually, when all was said and done – but frustrating in the extreme!
As for the 22nd, that was no fun at all. We were on the right cell, but we got to it maybe 10 minutes too late to see the beautiful stovepipe. This despite a mad core punch that cost us a huge hail crater in the driver’s side of the windshield. And things went downhill from there. Congrats to all who actually saw the Wilber and Hallam tornados. A major outbreak, we're right there in the thick of it, and we saw all of one semi-substantial white funnel, and a brief one at that. Feh! Yeah, I'd say the 22nd was definitely the most disappointing chase of the year.
