Your First Chase

[Tom Dulong]

First Chase Story

June 3rd, 1985 - Had just finished my forecast shift at the old NWS Forecast Office in Denver, Co. Jumped in a car with three scientists from NOAA's Forecast System Laboratory in Boulder. We followed a cell coming of the mountains south of Denver and saw a short-lived landspout near the town of Parker. I was one-for-one and thrilled. Never saw that batting average again!

 

[Bill Hark]

I had my first chase while in college in Charlottesville, Virginia in Spring of 1989. I basically drove at night to intercept a prolific lightning producing storm. It was producing amazing CG's. Unfortunately, everytime I set up my equipment, the heavy rain would start. I kept adjusting my position to get out of the rain shaft. I never got a decent still of a CG. I was also lucky I didn't get struck by lighting. I was out in the open on multiple occasions on the edge of the preciptiation shafts. Today, I wouldn't consider being that exposed so close to the storm.

Bill Hark

 

[Rob Satkus]

My first was April 22, 1985. Like most, I had been fascinated with storms since I was but a wee lad, but had never thought about doing anything more than staring out the window as a storm blew through. It wasn't until I met Fred Ikard in 1985, who also shared a passion for storms, but told me he actually went out to chase them. What a novel idea! He promised to take me on a chase when conditions came together. They did on the 22nd..we got a late start thanks to classes, but we planned on intercepting a supercell that was moving across west central OK...target: Calumet. We did a good job of catching the storm...almost too good. Just outside of town we ran thru some golfball hail, then ...nothing. We were a little confused but then we heard a weather report on the portable tv we had..."You folks in Calumet are in extreme danger...take shelter now...a tornado could form at any time!" Ok..the sun was out, the locals were all standing around...what was going on? I finally decided to look overhead and was greeted with a strange site..it looked like a whirlpool right above us...the orange colored clouds looked like they were shimmering as the road does on a hot summer day. Clouds were violently whipping about...up, down...chaos. At that moment we realized we were in big trouble...right under the wall cloud! Our driver panicked and drove straight into the core, with 60-70mph winds and golfball hail. I thought for sure my first chase would be my last as a tornado surely was bearing down upon us. Well, it wasn't. The wall cloud appeared again to our south, a brief funnel formed, but that was it. The wall cloud persisted for a long time and we chased until dark...I had a blast. I often wonder if that would have been a blue sky bust type event, would I have continued to chase? Eh, probably, but I may not have been as excited about it.

 

[Brian Stertz]

My first real "educated" chase was while I was at OU...caught a nice tail-end charlie supercell on the cold core negatively-tilted dryline near Alfalfa OK. It spun like a top but failed to drop a tornado as the meso wrapped up to my southeast and a funnel weakly organized. The date was April 22, 1985. I chased a few times after that in '85 but failed to get that elusive tornado as a tenderfoot chaser.

 

[Dustin Wilcox]

My first chase occurred when I was about 3 and in this particular chase I was the one being chased, while my Mom was the one chasing me. From the stories I hear combined with my very vague memories I guess I used to get all angry and would try to escape the confinds of the basement when I was young during tornado warnings; while my mother would restrain me and keep me in the basement. To this day I blaim the actions of my folks on my passion for chasing, it was the torture that lead to curiosity build up from being locked in the basement with my mother while my dad was able to stay upstairs and stand out on the porch observing what was occurring.

 

[Brian Stertz]

That's funny Dustin...my parents could only hope to contain me when the tornado sirens went off. My Dad normally stood vigil with me on the front porch as tornado sirens blared across the entire county when the actual threatened area was 25 miles away!! The old warning days were sure frustrating ones I remember as a kid. Then add in the misguided information from the OLD Boy Scout handbook that showed that mammatus clouds were somehow connected directly to funnel/tornado production to boot. Those were interesting times growing up. Thank goodness for that one tornado book at the Kirkwood public library, and for later spotter classes to bring me knowledge as a soon to be chaser. I still can remember the infamous spotter class film...with "this is Salina KS"...and it shows a trailer park getting shredded (naturally).

 

[mike scantlin]

well. when i was around 7 or 8(1993ish), i moved to owasso oklahoma(tulsa area) and my cousin would baby sit me. everytime it would storm, we would run out to the backyard, and push the trampoline up to the house. then we would stand on the front porch and watch.. lightning all around. wind, rain. it was amazing. i remember being on the trampoline, watching a distant storm, and then lightning hit a tree a few hundred feet away, in the nieghbors yard. we jumped off, and ran inside. i have never run so fast in my life. one time, when the sirens went off, he locked me outside. scared me pretty bad, but i saw some interesting things. nothing that i can remember very well, but some weird motion in the clouds. then i was hooked. i always tried to take pictures of lightning with some cheap@ss cameras that my dad bought me. i only ever got 2. they were ok. for my 10th birthday, my grandma got me a vhs camcorder. from then on, everytime there was a storm within 30 miles, i was outside. the only tape i have left, me and my dad were looking north out the back door, loads of lightning, low clouds not too far off, sirens blaring. we decided to go inside. before we even got inside, a huge gust of wind hits us. loud banging, roaring wind. we look out the front door, and see my trampoline flying across the street. since i knew how to read a radar screen by then, we were pretty much in the hook at that point. straight-line winds. rfd.

my first real chase. glenpool oklahoma. soccer practice. it was may, 2003. probably the 6th. during practice, i could see some storms popping up. i had been looking at pictures and learning all i could about storms on the internet. around then i was spending alot of time on stormguy.com. dave crowleys site. i learned alot from those guys. well, i was leaving the fieldhouse, and got popped in the head with some penny sized hail. awesome. as soon as i got home, my dad was watching the radar on tv. sups everywhere. there was one just popping up just southwest of us. i didnt have my license yet, but i jumped in the car and took my dad on our first chase. went south on 75 to 151st, went east, and parked about 1/2 a mile east of 75. LP. beautiful. mean wall cloud. intense upward motion. really wrapped up. a small finger came out a little ways, then it went back up, we continued to follow the storm for a little ways. it transitioned into HP. we lost it. came home and watched it on tv. i knew i wanted to do this. for fun. for money. for whatever. a few nights later, i was at band practice(crappy little "punk" band) and i saw a tornado warning for creek county, west of tulsa. i made my bandmates jump into our drummers explorer, and go into tulsa. saw the rain free base. and a lowering(maybe wall cloud) but by the time we were close enough, it had just died. a cell to the north put down an f3 that dave crowley and justin teague intercepted. or maybe just saw damage. i dont know. i remember something about a dead horse. so yeah. that was my start.

 

[Tony Laubach]

May 14, 1997: Clarksburg, OH

My Dad arrived home in time to see my mom waking me from a nap on the couch to inform me that a tornado had been sighted about 30 miles from our house. My Dad looked down at me and said, "You wanna chase it?"

In the station wagon we jumped and within an hour, I was snapping this shot; a small tornado just outside of Clarksburg, OH. We followed this supercell storm for over an hour as the debris cloud churned along the country-side. My Dad quickly grasped me obsession as I remember him looking at the tornado with wide-eyed amazment. Not to mention his 16 year-old son just guided him through quarter-sized hail and talked him straight to this tornado. How I wish I could replicate that luck!

So like my chasing buddy, Tom, I was one-for-one. Took me 3 years to see my next one, and another 3 on top of that before I really started counting.

My first chase, always one of my faves!

 

[samuel stone]

I'll keep it somewhat brief, first educated chase ( I had breifling messed around with chasing from 1999-2003) was on March 27th 2004, just missed large Kinsley, KS F3. On this day most attention was focused further south in oklahoma, so many have forgotten this tornado.

First tornado seen was on June 12th, 2004. (Infamous Mulvane Tornado)

 

[Shane Adams]

http://www.passiontwist.us/6696chase.htm

 

[John Farley]

When I was a kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Waterloo, Iowa, my father and I would sit in the garage and watch storms through the open garage door, as long as we could until the wind and rain forced us to retreat. I remember one time during a night-time storm what seems to have been ball lightning hitting a transformer behind the house and a couple doors down and knocking out the power. There had been a nearby lighting strike to our SE, followed a split second later by a steady glow for a couple seconds coming from the NE, then simultaneously a crash of thunder from the NE and the power went out, followed quickly by another crash of thunder from the original bolt to the SE.

I also remember in 1965 (I think it was) watching from our picture window as the rain and wind became so intense that you could not see the houses across the street. Turned out a rain-wrapped tornado had passed a block north of our house. When I saw the damage that did to homes not far from ours, I realized how foolhardy watching through that window had been, and for a time after that, I was quick to take shelter when the sirens blew.

However, my fascination with the weather stayed, and in 1995 and 1996 I started trying to go after storms after they had passed over. Of course that did not work very well, so I started studying storm chasing on the Web. My first planned chase was on December 23, 1996. It took me into golfball hail and I nearly turned right into a rain-wrapped tornado in Evansville, IL. But I knew just enough, thankfully, to make the right decision after a series of blunders that had gotten me into that position. And I was hooked - an actual encounter with a tornado on my first serious chase. An account of that chase is at:

http://www.siue.edu/~jfarley/chased23.htm

I have been at it ever since, and hopefully am a little less blunder-prone by now.

 

[Verne Carlson]

June 20th 1987 Littleton, CO

This is a picture from my first chase. I saw this very dark greenish folded wall-cloud come over my apartment and I grabbed my Pentax ME Super and ran outside to the end of the parking lot. I snapped off a roll of pictures as this funnel spun overhead. From there on I was hooked!

 

[Paul Austin]

First tornado personally witnessed: Late 70's. I was about six years old. A supercell passed through my small town of Greenwood, AR dropping golfball-sized hail and producing a nice rotating wall cloud that my parents watched from underneath the carport overhang (their account). The storm passed and the sky cleared completely. About an hour later, a second storm hit dropping enough baseball-sized hail to leave a blanket of 3/4" diameter discs 3 inches deep after a couple hours of melting. It was during this storm that my parents placed us (myself, a brother and sister) in the bathroom closet for shelter. After about ten minutes, they called us out to look out a south-facing window to observe a wedge approximately five miles away, moving east. I remember being transfixed on this large cloud on the ground; large enough that its rotation appeared slow to me compared to all the educational videos I had seen in school. For a few minutes, the wedge was "outrun" from behind by a thin satellite tornado. All told, six tornados were reported in our county that day, though some were probably repeat reports. My parents returned us to the closet, and I was changed forever. While my friends checked out fiction and sports books, I was reading everything I could about tornados and their parent storms, including all the myths that surround them.

Many "local" chases occured from the time I could drive until 2002, when I took my brother, Marc, on our first real chase in the Plains. We saw no tornadoes that year (a little hail and some wind damage), but the trip was so fun that we have returned each year since with some tornado success every trip. I wouldn't trade the experiences (even 2006) for anything.

 

[John MacKay]

My first solo chase was on my parents' 26th wedding anniversary (June 12th, a proflic day of the year to most storm chasers). The SPC said the OK side of the moderate risk was the place to be , but I should have went with instincts on a developing storm 30 miles north of the border. Even though that storm had only one tornado, it would have kept me in position for the better storm 75 minutes later. In fact, I should have stayed home.

I went to OK briefly, crossed the border again 15 miles to the west to get on the Sumner County storm, but that one weakened before getting to me. Then my worst scenario, radio confirms two reports of a tornado 18 miles SE of Wichita OR 1 MILE WEST OF DOUGLASS (that was the order it came across in the warning)! Now I'm freaking out for three reasons. One, I've went 70-80 miles at this point, and a tornado is sighted one mile west of my hometown (and 30 miles away from it). Two, my sister was home alone (thankfully, there was a weather radio, but the warning came a good 5 minutes after the report). Three, my parents were going to a dinner south of town, and would have come close to the path of the first tornado report (see 7 NW of Atlanta report). To add to that, there were a couple of streams of water on the last ten miles of my drive home.
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/reports/020612_rpts.html

The tornado apparently lifted before getting to town (the river probably kept it from entering town). Two years after that storm, the Mulvane tornado happened, and the three tornadoes I saw that day are still the only ones I've seen. This was the third one (the one after the Mulvane one). Lightning prevented me from photographing the Mulvane one (it was in my trunk, go figure).