Man, it's been a long time since I last posted in here (looks like my last post was 10 years ago, sheesh!) but I figured I'd dip in to contribute to the conversation about this season. Whatever the hell this cluster can be described as.
2023 has been, bar none, the strangest season I've chased in my now 17 years(!) of chasing. Nothing has made sense, or been particularly predictable more than 72 hours out, which has made planning a real PITA and basically a complete crapshoot. As a great example, I wasn't planning on chasing the last week of May in NM/west TX, but I ended up buying a new to me chase vehicle outside Fort Worth on the 23rd after doing a week long work gig in the Metroplex, and then decided 'screw it, I'm chasing' and ended up getting the jaw dropping Hawley, TX mothership and two tornadoes almost completely to myself later that night, and the following days ended up being some of the best chasing under 'marginal ridge' conditions I can ever remember.
I've been relatively fortunate to have seen 18 tornadoes this season, a lot of them early on in the season (I was living in Ohio for nine months and working in the expedite logistics industry, which I used to my advantage to pick work shipments that were going to or in the same general area as some of the early Dixie chase targets which allowed me to be on Rolling Fork and Searcy) but very few of them have been photogenic (at least from where I was viewing them from) and I've had my typical luck of seeing tornadoes on big days but not the tornadoes of the day, but the structure this year has been phenomenal, probably the best structure year since 2013, IMHO and actual photogenic CG activity has made a big comeback. Forecasting has been insanely tricky from the outset. There's been very few days that have been obvious and that actually panned out without some major fly in the ointment. I passed on 4/19 because of the forecast capping concerns (and I was getting ready to move to Kansas City) and regret that choice deeply, as my target was southern Kansas where a spectacular supercell dropped three photogenic tornadoes and only had about a dozen chasers on it as most everyone else was down in Oklahoma on the Cole/Etowah/Shawnee beast).
2023 is a VERY different season from what we've seen in the last three years, but it's also got the same pattern of behavior that has been plaguing seemingly every season since roughly 2016; we just cannot seem to get consolidated upper flow and systems to be strengthening, rather than weakening, as they eject from the Rockies, and on the odd occasion we do get a strengthening system, it has a thermonuclear capping inversion which squashes the excellent environment, or has such extreme forcing associated with it that it triggers an instasquall. Which has made the vast majority of the more notable events this year, as in prior years, highly dependent on mesoscale accidents. With the exception of 3/31 high risk where you saw widespread significant tornadic activity over a multi state region, we've seen the same pattern emerge of there being one, maybe two storms that truly go nuts and are cyclic monsters, and every other storm just fails to take advantage of what seems to be a synoptically favorable environment. If you don't join the hoards and aren't elbowing to get the same general shot everyone else is, chances are you're going to miss the show of the day.
My overarching theory is that with global warming, the upper atmospheric contrast and height falls/sufficiently cold mid level temps at the 500 mb level to break these increasingly stout 700 mb caps created by an ever warming and increasingly moist atmosphere simply aren't there 90% of the time, and I suspect that unless we get something like a Pinatubo/Krakatoa style volcanic eruption that cools the atmosphere significantly, at least for a half decade or so, I don't think we're going to see widespread regional tornado outbreaks going forward except for with highly anomalous systems, and those systems seem to be happening during the winter/early spring months and largely confined to well east of I-35, with the attendant rocketship speeds. It's gutting to watch traditional chase season become a hollow shadow of its former self and the glory days of relatively slow moving, photogenic tornadoes/classic sups in moderately optimal to superb chase terrain become something largely viewed in the rear view mirror, but the persistence and consistency of the failure modes really can't be ignored at this point.
As to the coming pattern, it's hard to motivate myself to go out for another extended period. Yes, we're finally getting a major pattern change, and for a while it looked like we were potentially gonna get June 2014 Round 2... and now that we're here, it looks like a garbage barge. I'm doing some WFH stuff to bring in some money while I work towards transitioning into a new career, but I specifically busted my ass back east all winter/early spring to be able to take time off to chase with the idea that transitioning out of the shit Never Ending La Nina pattern would be more fruitful, as many prior transition years have been bumper crops for great setups... and now I'm almost on the verge of throwing in the towel and starting to apply seriously for new jobs in the field I want to work in, because this pattern is simply flabbergasting, and I don't want to totally drain my hard earned nest egg waiting for *something* favorable to come along.
Knowing my luck, as soon as I settle into a new full time job and tie myself up with a commitment, the Central/Northern Plains and Upper Midwest will probably go nuts later in July/August, but after all these years of chasing (and frankly, not all that much to show for the time/money I've invested, at least from my personal-professional goals) I'm starting to accept the reality of that missing most of the great storms is just part of life if I want to have a stable life going forward - all these years of working IC gigs to keep the flexibility to chase are starting to really catch up to me and watching all my friends talking about their S/O's, houses and nice 401k's and benefits has me realizing that chasing the wind as fervently as I have, has been largely a fool's errand; particularly in a climate changed world. Reed Timmer and a handful of others are the lucky ones who can 'chase everything', but they also forgo a lot of consistency and companionship to live the lives they do. A sacrifice I find myself increasingly unwilling to keep making.
I was utterly spoiled by coming into chasing during the incredible 'Golden Years' of 2007-2014, as I think all of us long time chasers were, and I'm now realizing it's been NINE years since we've had a truly consistently good chase season and it's time to take off the rose colored nostalgia glasses and accept that chasing in the present is simply a lot higher risk/questionable reward proposition than it was a decade ago. Planning your 'chasecation', if you want to see photogenic/significant tornadoes, in May/June is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a 'Scenic Tours of the Great Plains!' and after spending the last 5.5 years traversing them for work purposes, I'm getting bored of it.
As of right now, I'm doing some needed maintenance on the chase rig this weekend, and I'll re-evaluate come Monday, but as of right now, unless things change significantly, I'm going to focus on other things this coming week, and maybe wait for Ma Nature to sneak in a 'morning of' curveball that I can bounce out the door and catch; I didn't move to KC without some level of malice and forethought for being within a 6-8 hour drive of most targets in the Plains and Midwest, after all
Will there be a photogenic tornado or two, and maybe even a significant tornado, somewhere in this pattern? I wouldn't bet against it, though I suspect its going to end up being a high CAPE and mesoscale interaction driven scenario, as has become par for the course in recent years. But my optimism for a larger scale pattern of multiple days with good classic discrete sup and tor probabilities is, needless to say, greatly diminished.
. I've chased off and on since 1998, I to have seen this change as well and I think just now as Marks post described very well, the possible reasons behind the disarray in the patterns.
