April 23rd took me to southwest Kansas. A surface low and triple point was southeast of Goodland. Models showed supercells developing on the dryline and interacting with the warm front as they moved northeast and were forecast to spin hard there. That’s exactly what happened. I intercepted one supercell near Healy, Kansas that attached itself to the warm front in an environment of high theta-e air and it became tornado warned. I had to drive through copious amounts of golfball sized hail to get to the hook and what a beauty it was!! Low bowl shaped wall cloud with rain/hail wrapping around it as it spun HARD. It tried to cone up a couple times but couldn’t maintain it’s tight rotation to get a tornado down. Eventually it moved into colder air north of the warm front and weakened. I dropped south to catch another developing supercell west of Kalvesta, Kansas. a massive bowl shaped lowering was spinning hard. It produced a tapered funnel halfway to the ground, but never did contact it. Structure was nice with that classic backward “C” shape to the RFD eroded updraft. It also crossed into colder air and weakened. By then it was almost dark and time to head to the hotel for the night. Fun day and enjoy the pics!
April 19, 2025 Mertzon, Texas Tornado
April 19th was a long drive. Up at 4am to hit the road, we blasted nearly 700 miles, only to miss the best tornado of the day by 20 minutes. Talk about frustration! Models/NWS/SPC stated the tornado threat wouldn’t ramp up until after 6pm when the low level jet kicked in. All were wrong! Before 4pm a supercell hit the boundary and became tornadic. By the time we arrived, that storm had weakened so we targeted another supercell west/northwest of San Angelo. It also became briefly tornadic as the main meso wrapped up and dropped a cone funnel to the ground! It was only down a couple of minutes before lifting back up. A long drive, but we at least were able to capture a tornado!
April 2-4 Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas Tornado Warned Supercells
We ran an on call storm chasing tour in TN/AR/TX during the April 2-4 period. We caught numerous tornado warned supercells, however on the Lake City, AR day (4/2), we debated whether to play west of the MS river or east. (Very few crossings!) Parameters were pretty sweet. We ultimately chose east (ugh) due to several discrete cells and at that time nothing west of the river. Sooo, no tornado for us! Chased a half dozen tor warned storms, but nothing produced in TN, till after midnight of course.
Second day we chased southwest AR/NW LA. Storms formed southwest of us (Ida, LA) and became tor warned. As they approached and crossed the front into wet, cool, stratus filled skies that was the end. Elevated for certain.
Last day (4./4), after spending the night in Texarkana, we stayed close. We were torn between the ne TX play or venturing up towards Little Rock as models were producing isolated supercells ahead of the front. We started towards Little Rock (Thinking of the Lake City event and hoping for Part 2!) and turned back around as several supercells emerged out of junky clusters in northeast Texas. We managed to catch one tornadic supercell between Texarkana and Douglassville, TX. A couple tornado reports came across, but appeared to be buried back in the Rear flank core around the hook. We found a spot by a lake as the storm approached. It was INSANELY electrified. You could see a VERY low wall cloud (possible messy circulation?) that persisted for many minutes before CGs hitting on the other side of us ran us back in to the van.
Fun trip, a bit disappointing that we didn’t catch the Lake City tornado, but you have to make choices and with several developing supercells east of the river, there was no way we were staying west. Even SPC’s MD hit western TN the hardest. Funny thing, we actually drove through Jonesboro and Lake City coming down from Springfield, MO that day. Ironic as can be…….
2025 Chase Season!!!!
Stay tuned for our 2025 season chase logs! Operations for on call tours begin March 1st and our scheduled tours begin April 25th!