6/17/09 Amarillo, Fritch, Borger, Stinnett
88 Mile Storm Intercept
Extremely severe straight line winds, 70-80 mph
KE5ZRT & KE5ZRU
I was at work at the airport and several of my employees kept asking me if we were expecting severe weather today. I hadn't checked out any of the stormtrack forums, because the local news forecast was only predicting a slight chance of rain and no severe weather. I had been engrossed in work on the computer in an office without windows, and I couldn't figure out why everyone kept asking me about the weather...until Terra called me and told me that we needed to be on the road. When I looked out the windows of the airport after talking to Terra, I was shocked to see an immense gust front moving in. The boss let me leave work, and I ran to the truck to go pick up Terra. As I was driving west bound on I-40 through town at about 60 mph with the cruise on, I hit at least a 70 mph headwind that slowed me down to about 40 mph and I couldn't accelerate into it!
By the time I picked Terra up from the house, the front was already moving northeast out of Amarillo. There was already one storm spotter, WS5R north of Amarillo on US 87 where a tractor-trailer was overturned blocking the southbound two lanes of US 87. He reported that he was behind the leading edge of the storm and wouldn't be able to keep up with the fast moving front from his location, and recommended that we take highway 136 northeast to Fritch. As we neared Fritch, we were still behind the storm which was moving almost as fast as we were driving. We continued on into Borger where the leading edge of the storm had already passed through, and the straight line winds had blown down power lines and ripped the steel roof off of a small strip mall on the north side of town--shown in the video above. We followed the storm into Stinnett where we gave up the chase because the leading edge was already well ahead of us again. We back-tracked to Borger to get video footage of the damage to send to the Amarillo National Weather Service.
Action Items:
• The driver-side window is still leaking.
• I still need an anemometer, and hail guards.
• "TornadoAlleyRats.com" vinyl graphics on the truck
• We'll need a new windshield soon. It is still intact, but it is difficult to shoot photos or videos through the cracks.
Notes: Well, this is probably just about the end of the official storm season. There may be a few more stray storms, but things should be slowing down significantly. This is a good time to start making some necessary repairs to the truck. Now that I am finally caught up on the storm reports, I intend to focus more on the "Rat Works" portion of this blog where I describe equipment and upgrades to our chase vehicle. Incidentally, I relocated the Garmin GPS today and mounted it to the headliner just over the rearview mirror. It sounds like a simple job, but I had to almost completely drop the headliner to get it done. While I was at it, I also installed permanent antenna mounts on the truck which required drilling two 3/4" holes in the roof! The new permanent antenna mounts should perform a lot better than the old magnet mounts.
6/15/09 Dodge City, Spearville, Greensburg, Haviland
620 Mile Storm Intercept
Extremely severe straight line winds
Numerous funnels & lowerings
A multi-vortex tornado was reported--but we missed it!
KE5ZRS, KE5ZRT, & KE5ZRU
The threat of severe weather at home in Amarillo today was listed as "possible" by the National Weather Service but the conditions did not look likely to us. It was my day off from work so I decided I would use the time to make some needed repairs to the truck. I called around to several auto parts dealers in town and finally found a new manual passenger side mirror for the truck at Dulaney Auto and Truck Parts for $45. That was a lot cheaper than I expected, and they also told us that they could get our windshield replaced for about $150 parts and labor included. The OEM electric mirror was only $20 more but I figure that I'll probably just knock it off of the truck again anyway so I followed my wife's advice and settled for the manual mirror. I opened up the door panel in the driveway and was about halfway through the installation of the new mirror when Terra came outside and asked if I wanted to go to Kansas. She had been reading discussions online at the StormTrack.org forecast forums, and the weather at Kansas really looked exciting.
Rotating wall cloud underneath a mesocyclonic base, 5 miles north northeast of Dodge City, Kansas 6/15/09
I quickly wrapped up the mirror installation and put the door panel back on while she loaded up the laptop and cameras. We tanked up the truck and headed north toward Stratford at about noon, and then northeast to Liberal. Our original decision to intercept at Garden City soon changed as storms were quickly building at Dodge City. When we reached Dodge, the system was moving east-northeast fairly quickly. We decided to intercept at the leading edge on the northeast side of Dodge where we observed a mesocyclonic system with a rotating lowering that was not quite a funnel. We followed the storm northeast into Spearville and the system began to take more of an east or southeast track. We headed south and east of Spearville on some backroads and ended up on a road that wouldn't take us where we needed to be. We ultimately lost track of the storm and had to head waaaaaaaay south to Highway 400 that eventually put us back on an intercept path at Greensburg Kansas. Once again, if I had listened to my wife and stayed on highway 56 out of Spearville...we would have seen the multi-vortex tornado that was reported south of Kinsley.
Downburst west of Spearville, Kansas 6/15/09
The straight line winds near Haviland were at least 70 mph. (I still need an anemometer!) The winds were so heavy that my truck was rocking while parked on the side of the highway. West of Haviland four power poles were snapped in half from the wind, and in that same spot, a pickup truck was blown off the road into the culvert. We stopped to check on the driver who was unharmed, but his driver side window was shattered by debris from the straight line wind. The driver said he never even saw the debris that hit him, he only heard the objects hitting his vehicle.
Damage from straight line winds east of Haviland, Kansas 6/15/09
We followed the system into Pratt, but the temperature had dropped substantially and the storm was rapidy diminishing. So we headed for home. During the long drive home, Terra was monitoring the radar and we chose to take the long and scenic route home through Buffalo Oklahoma to intercept a dying storm. We knew that we would not be able to observe any severe weather, but we decided it would be more interesting to drive home in the rain than it would be to drive home on dry roads--especially after missing a tornado!
A dying storm near Buffalo, Oklahoma 6/15/09
As this storm had tracked from Perryton Texas to Buffalo Oklahoma there were reports of "hen egg" size hail, but by the time we reached it, it was just a big pretty cloud with a giant anvil in the sunset. I'm glad we took the long road home, the drive was beautiful and we were in no hurry anyhow. We arrived home at about 1:30 in the morning and we were exhausted. I am grateful to KE5WRT (James Hiers) and AD5OK (Stewart) who "talked us home" over the ham radio once we were back into radio coverage of the Caprock Intertie.
Lowering from a dying storm near Buffalo Oklahoma 6/15/09--The mammatus are beautiful in the sunset!
Action Items:
• The driver-side window is still leaking.
• I still need an anemometer, and hail guards.
• "TornadoAlleyRats.com" vinyl graphics on the truck
• We'll need a new windshield soon. It is still intact, but it is difficult to shoot photos or videos through the cracks.
• Listen to wife more often
While chasing a tornado east of Pampa this season, I had to get out of the truck several times on the side of the highway to get a better view of the storm and to help the highway patrol direct/block traffic from entering the storm as it crossed the highway. While I was out of the truck, I was unable to monitor net control emergency communications from my ham radio. I tried rolling the windows down, but I still couldn't hear well, and my seats got wet! It was at that point that I decided I needed an external speaker on the truck.
I found a 6" Road Shock brand speaker at Harbor Freight, and it was on sale for 12 bucks! The speaker is weather resistant, and is designed to mount on an off road vehicle's lightbar so it is designed to look like an off road spotlight. Because of its intended purpose it has a large carriage bolt to mount it to a light bar. I didn't want to drill a large hole in the roof of my truck so I cut about an inch off of the length of the mounting bolt and attached the speaker to a magnetic base intended for ham radio or CB radio antenna mounting. The speaker is now very securely attached to the roof of my truck without drilling any additional holes. I routed the speaker wire through the roof using an existing compression grommet that I had previously installed for routing power wiring for my amber warning lights.
The next thing I needed to figure out was how to switch between using the newly installed light bar speaker and the speaker that I use inside the truck. I probably could have found some sort of a switching device online, but I am impatient and I wanted to build one myself. My electrical engineering experience is mostly limited to car stereo installations but I thought I could figure out how to do this.
Open Switch Box Front View
Open Switch Box Rear View
There's not much to explain about the wiring...it's all fairly self explanatory from the photos. The center audio jack is the input from the ham radio, and the other two jacks are output for the two speakers. After the wiring and soldering was complete, I drilled a hole in the center of the bottom of the box and used an existing interior molding screw under the dash to mount the switch box.
This project came out very well and only took me about a half a day to complete, and only cost about 20 dollars! The speaker sounds good and serves it's purpose well. The ham radio only puts out 3 watts of power and the new external speaker is designed to handle 30 watts so the audio could stand to be a little louder. I think I will upgrade the system later by installing a cheap amplifier (about $30) with speaker level inputs to improve the volume.
I had to work during this storm so Terra and our son James chased without me once again. Until this year, Terra had never chased without me. I guess the reason for our increased eagerness to chase, even when I can't get out of work to chase with her, is due in part to our investment in new equipment and training, and also, now that we are SKYWARN spotters we just wouldn't feel right about sitting on the couch watching tv and eating potato chips while severe weather rolls in. So, if we both can't chase she will probably continue to chase without me as often as necessary. Our son James has been chasing with us since he was 10 years old and now that he is 17 he makes a pretty good hand, so I feel fairly confident in their ability to work as a team when I can't be there. Fortunately, I earn a month of vacation time each year from my day job, and it usually isn't terribly difficult for me to take time off.
News Channel 10 Radar Image
Terra and James were dispatched by the NWS net control to Highway 60 southwest towards Hereford. I had been monitoring her APRS activity, the radar, and amateur radio communications from work, and I cringed when I heard her intended location. I hate chasing on that particular part of the highway because when the storm moves to the east over that highway there is no good way to follow it because there are very few roadways leading back to the east from there. Just as I expected, the storm moved to the northeast over highway 60, and Terra ended up taking some slow and winding backroads toward Tulia.
Non-rotating lowering near Nazareth
Quitaque and Turkey were pounded once again by large hail, and Terra had no way of getting there from her current location. But it was all for the best anyhow. There was no reported tornadic activity in this storm, and she probably would have only further damaged our presently cracked windshield! She did spot and report this picturesque non-rotating lowering cloud formation though. This storm quickly fizzled out and no real severe weather was reported.
APRS track of this storm chase. APRS does not work very well in this area because of the lack of digipeaters in this low lying terrain--Terra did not drive across the fields as the map indicates!
Action Items:
• The driver-side window is still leaking.
• I still need an anemometer, and hail guards.
• "TornadoAlleyRats.com" vinyl graphics on the truck
• Passenger side mirror needs to be replaced
• We'll need a new windshield soon. It is still intact, but it is difficult to shoot photos or videos through the cracks.
National Weather Service Graphicast of the Amarillo area 6/13/09
As you can see from the graphicast above, all of the conditions for severe weather were present on this date and I had taken a day of vacation from work to chase this storm. Chasers from all over the country were hyped about this storm system and so were we. Click here to view the stormtrack.org discussion about the predictions of this weather system. The conditions were coming together nicely for tornadic activity, but I think a lot of the excitement was due in part to the fact that this was the last day of the chase season for the Vortex2 research team.
Our APRS track of the storm intercept 6/13/09. As you can see, we took the long route to Turkey!
We started out early because we didn't want to miss this storm and we chose Childress as our staging point because of the discussion on stormtrack.org. Ordinarilly we don't begin chasing a weather system until there are some storm clouds building in our area, so it was wierd heading to Childress on Highway 287 with all of our gear and equipment but not a cloud in the sky! After we passed through Memphis, we began to see cumulonimbus clouds building to our southwest over Plainview and Quitaque, but they were small and surely couldn't be the storm we were intending to intercept! The system over Quitaque continued to build very quickly into a giant mushroom and the anvil stretched for miles over Childress. We soon decided that this was in fact the storm that we needed to intercept and we headed back to the west out of Estelline on Highway 86 toward Turkey.
This is a lowering on the leading edge of the storm as we approached it from east of Turkey Texas. 6/13/09
As we neared Turkey, the storm cell showed a north, northeast track and was presently to our south. We intended to be on the south side of the storm, but the storm was so large it would have taken at least an hour to get to the south side of it so we chose to stay ahead of it instead. I chose Highway 70 north out of Turkey, and as we headed down into the Caprock Canyons we lost radio communications, our cell phone signals were no good, and we lost our internet connection so we had no radar! We were flying completely blind.
Our newly cracked windshield after encountering baseball size hail. The hail stone busting on the windshield is not the one that actually did the damage, but I thought it was a cool photo.
As the storm crossed over Highway 70, it crossed over us as well and we got ourselves into quite a hail storm with baseball size hail. A baseball size hailstone left a radial crack in our windshield the size of a basketball. I was afraid we were going to completely lose the windshield, and I was very concerned about the warning light bar on top of the truck. There was nowhere to run for shelter and I didn't know if I should run north or south to get out of the hail, and I didn't know if a tornado might be nearby since we lost all communications. I pulled off the road at about 30 mph and tucked our truck under a mesquite tree that really wasn't tall enough to put our truck under, but I made it fit anyway. In the process, a tree branch knocked the passenger side mirror off of the door, but I think our mesquite tree shelter prevented us from completely loosing the windshield and light bar. When the hail let up a little, we continued north after securing the mirror that was dangling from a wire on the side of the truck and soon ran into more ping-pong and golf ball size hail. The storm soon crossed over highway 70 completely and we were under blue skies once again. We continued to chase this storm back to Claude, TX where we observed nothing more than high winds and torrential rainfall.
Action Items:
• The driver-side window is still leaking.
• I still need an anemometer, and hail guards.
• "TornadoAlleyRats.com" vinyl graphics on the truck
• Passenger side mirror needs to be replaced
• We'll need a new windshield soon. It is still intact, but it is difficult to shoot photos or videos through the cracks.
Notes: I was reminded once again that I need to listen to my navigator! Terra told me while we were east of Turkey that I should take Ranch Road 656 to the southeast until the storm passed over, but I didn't listen! In theory, that would have put us on the south side of the storm, and in theory we would still have a mirror and a clear windshield--but where's the fun in that?!? We also learned that we need to keep the cameras rolling, even when the conditions are scary! It would have been great to have video of the baseball hail, and a photo of our truck tucked in under the mesquite tree would have been cool too.
