Andy Wehrle
EF5
I started to type this in the "State of the Chase Season 2023" thread, but realized it had veered way off topic for a thread that was supposed to be for more technical discussion of the teleconnections and longer range modeling indicators for how the 2023 season will play out.
...
I'm also not minding the downtime as I had/have a lot of social/family obligations in recent and upcoming weeks, and the afterglow of Keota will carry me through that as it did the disappointment of screwing up 4/4.
To accompany all the recent discussion in the Weed Trimmer and "near death experience" threads, I feel like that intercept has taken the pressure off and allowed me to step back and reassess my approach to chasing. In the past, I often felt like I was always out there trying to redeem myself for the last big miss/bust. First Pilger, then Rochelle, then Mangum, then Benkelman, Winterset, Gilmore City, etc., etc. Even if I didn't bust, I'd usually manage to mess up the intercept in some fashion and come away with much less quality "tornado time" and imagery than I easily could have by doing things just slightly differently. Some examples being at Hanna City, IL on 3/15/16, Waverly, IA on 7/14/21, and DeKalb County, IL on 8/9/21.
Keota was essentially my dream intercept. A few comments on my YouTube video have said that it wasn't really a "chase" because 99% of it was tripoded and from one spot. I picked a target area and drove toward it, monitoring radar en route, then picked a storm and a location downstream on its track that I thought would have a good view of the updraft base with multiple escape options if I turned out to be in the path. When I reached there I set up, waited and shot the tornado as it went by. I'd gambled that I would reach the storms right as they hit that "sweet spot" of parameters but before the discrete cells started to get gobbled by the following line, and for once it paid off. I have no interest in blasting through the core toward a debris signature unable to see anything but rain, or driving like a maniac a hundred feet from the tornado as debris impacts my vehicle, panic sets in and I totally lose my bearings on which way to go to stay out of the path.
Now that I finally have just one "career"-type intercept of an intense, photogenic tornado, I feel like I'll be able to better appreciate things like that pretty but benign skeletal LP that was all my target could muster as tornado reports pour in at an alternative target which I'd also seriously considered (Benkelman day), that ominous shelf cloud and sunset mammatus on a day when storms instantly grew upscale, etc, without wondering in the back of my mind whether the long hours behind the wheel, thousands of miles and hundreds of dollars in gas/motel money were really worth it.
@Skip Talbot , a chaser I've long held in high regard, recently posted a detailed accounting of his particularly painful bust on 4/4. He's always tried to conclude every chase account with some lesson(s) drawn from the experience, and summed this one up with:
"...Never stop chasing, except for all those times when you really should stop chasing. Like when it’s no longer fun or safe. It’s just not worth it."
Words to live by. Make chasing fun again. It's not fun when you nearly get yourself killed and wreck your car. It's not fun when you get into a profane shouting match at the side of the road with someone else who was also trying to track the storm.
Social media really has contributed to a lot of us losing perspective, even those of us who are old enough to remember when "The" Facebook was just this kinda-neat website that a college kid made so that other college kids could keep in touch with their friends back home (or so we thought).
Besides storm chasing, I'm involved in a couple of other niche/"nerdy" hobbies that are also much less publicly "glamorous" than tangling with Nature's fury, namely railfanning and the collecting/appreciation of vintage electric fans. I've also encountered an at times surprising/dismaying level of toxicity in the Internet communities surrounding those hobbies, although I guess it's not so surprising considering you have a bunch of highly opinionated people organized around a topic they are passionate about. All the same, it does require some stepping back/taking a deep breath to avoid letting the idiots suck the enjoyment out of those hobbies for me, as well.
I'm venting/rambling here, you may think I'm full of ****, I don't really care. I'm just a guy from Wisconsin who's been interested in severe weather since childhood in the 1990s, has been trying for years to join that club of people who have seen a spectacular tornado and captured spectacular imagery of it, and finally succeeded.
The first reaction of both my mother and my wife to that news was "Great, now you can retire from chasing!" Heh. (I overhead them talking on the phone about conspiring to hide my keys the next time my wife catches me staring at maps of a big trough on Pivotal Weather) Maybe I really should. Not because I'm running the risk of being impacted by a tornado or some other weather-related hazard, but by somebody barreling through a stop sign at 90 MPH trying to catch up to a storm, checking RadarScope with one hand while filming with the other.
I'm not ready to stop chasing, but maybe now I'll be more okay with picking that "sleeper" target with less strong parameters but also the likelihood of less traffic. Now I'll go out on those 5%/2% slight risk days not on the slim, desperate hope of a rogue overacheiving supercell, but because I want to see whatever displays the sky might have in store.
Maybe now I won't obsessively stare at the long-range models agonizing over the prospect of another spring slipping away after botching my one crack at a synoptically-evident, high-potential tornado threat that was actually in my range on a day I could chase. Ah, who am I kidding? I'll still do that. But it'll be at least somewhat less agonizing, this year.
Peace out. See (ideally not literally run into) you under the meso.
...
I'm also not minding the downtime as I had/have a lot of social/family obligations in recent and upcoming weeks, and the afterglow of Keota will carry me through that as it did the disappointment of screwing up 4/4.
To accompany all the recent discussion in the Weed Trimmer and "near death experience" threads, I feel like that intercept has taken the pressure off and allowed me to step back and reassess my approach to chasing. In the past, I often felt like I was always out there trying to redeem myself for the last big miss/bust. First Pilger, then Rochelle, then Mangum, then Benkelman, Winterset, Gilmore City, etc., etc. Even if I didn't bust, I'd usually manage to mess up the intercept in some fashion and come away with much less quality "tornado time" and imagery than I easily could have by doing things just slightly differently. Some examples being at Hanna City, IL on 3/15/16, Waverly, IA on 7/14/21, and DeKalb County, IL on 8/9/21.
Keota was essentially my dream intercept. A few comments on my YouTube video have said that it wasn't really a "chase" because 99% of it was tripoded and from one spot. I picked a target area and drove toward it, monitoring radar en route, then picked a storm and a location downstream on its track that I thought would have a good view of the updraft base with multiple escape options if I turned out to be in the path. When I reached there I set up, waited and shot the tornado as it went by. I'd gambled that I would reach the storms right as they hit that "sweet spot" of parameters but before the discrete cells started to get gobbled by the following line, and for once it paid off. I have no interest in blasting through the core toward a debris signature unable to see anything but rain, or driving like a maniac a hundred feet from the tornado as debris impacts my vehicle, panic sets in and I totally lose my bearings on which way to go to stay out of the path.
Now that I finally have just one "career"-type intercept of an intense, photogenic tornado, I feel like I'll be able to better appreciate things like that pretty but benign skeletal LP that was all my target could muster as tornado reports pour in at an alternative target which I'd also seriously considered (Benkelman day), that ominous shelf cloud and sunset mammatus on a day when storms instantly grew upscale, etc, without wondering in the back of my mind whether the long hours behind the wheel, thousands of miles and hundreds of dollars in gas/motel money were really worth it.
@Skip Talbot , a chaser I've long held in high regard, recently posted a detailed accounting of his particularly painful bust on 4/4. He's always tried to conclude every chase account with some lesson(s) drawn from the experience, and summed this one up with:
"...Never stop chasing, except for all those times when you really should stop chasing. Like when it’s no longer fun or safe. It’s just not worth it."
Words to live by. Make chasing fun again. It's not fun when you nearly get yourself killed and wreck your car. It's not fun when you get into a profane shouting match at the side of the road with someone else who was also trying to track the storm.
Social media really has contributed to a lot of us losing perspective, even those of us who are old enough to remember when "The" Facebook was just this kinda-neat website that a college kid made so that other college kids could keep in touch with their friends back home (or so we thought).
Besides storm chasing, I'm involved in a couple of other niche/"nerdy" hobbies that are also much less publicly "glamorous" than tangling with Nature's fury, namely railfanning and the collecting/appreciation of vintage electric fans. I've also encountered an at times surprising/dismaying level of toxicity in the Internet communities surrounding those hobbies, although I guess it's not so surprising considering you have a bunch of highly opinionated people organized around a topic they are passionate about. All the same, it does require some stepping back/taking a deep breath to avoid letting the idiots suck the enjoyment out of those hobbies for me, as well.
I'm venting/rambling here, you may think I'm full of ****, I don't really care. I'm just a guy from Wisconsin who's been interested in severe weather since childhood in the 1990s, has been trying for years to join that club of people who have seen a spectacular tornado and captured spectacular imagery of it, and finally succeeded.
The first reaction of both my mother and my wife to that news was "Great, now you can retire from chasing!" Heh. (I overhead them talking on the phone about conspiring to hide my keys the next time my wife catches me staring at maps of a big trough on Pivotal Weather) Maybe I really should. Not because I'm running the risk of being impacted by a tornado or some other weather-related hazard, but by somebody barreling through a stop sign at 90 MPH trying to catch up to a storm, checking RadarScope with one hand while filming with the other.
I'm not ready to stop chasing, but maybe now I'll be more okay with picking that "sleeper" target with less strong parameters but also the likelihood of less traffic. Now I'll go out on those 5%/2% slight risk days not on the slim, desperate hope of a rogue overacheiving supercell, but because I want to see whatever displays the sky might have in store.
Maybe now I won't obsessively stare at the long-range models agonizing over the prospect of another spring slipping away after botching my one crack at a synoptically-evident, high-potential tornado threat that was actually in my range on a day I could chase. Ah, who am I kidding? I'll still do that. But it'll be at least somewhat less agonizing, this year.
Peace out. See (ideally not literally run into) you under the meso.
