Repositioning...

Chase day 3

So far, every day we wake up the Storm Prediction Centre has issued a slight risk of severe weather for at least the next 2 or 3 days and this morning was no exception. A slight risk does sound fairly crap, but in reality it’s much better than it sounds. Clicking on the tornado probability shows an area of 5% surrounded by an area of 2% which sounds even worse. What starts to make sense is when you dig into the numbers. A 5% risk means you have a 5% risk of seeing a tornado within a 25 mile radius within the highlighted area. Hang on, that still looks bad, right?

Storm chasing is about making these numbers work in your favour – pitching up in the highlighted area and hoping for the best would clearly be hopeless. Storm chasers use this information to choose a “target area”, a place which looks like a good starting off point. Using a combination of web resources, radar images, reports from other chasers, local knowledge, maps, experience and instinct amongst many other things directs chasers to the right place to intercept storms at the right time. Now the odds are increasing. From memory, about 30% of supercell thunderstorms  will produce a tornado. So, if you’re on one your odds have gone from 5% to 30% of seeing a tornado. Sound much better? Imagine if it’s a really good day and you intercept 3 supercells, your chances of seeing a tornado have gone to up to 65.7%. Sounds much better! I bet you thought it would be 90% haha! Ok, the probability comes from one minus the probability of no tornadoes occurring to the power of the number of supercells. The reality of course could be anywhere from 0-100% depending on how good you are and what’s happening with the weather, but hopefully you get the drift.

Today’s target area would likely be somewhere in the 5% area which today is in Minnisota. Picking a random town in that area and asking directions from Google maps from Childress gave the distance as 1,060 miles and 17 hours travelling time. That’s longer than the entire length of the UK, from John O’Groats to Landsend.  Even by hard core chasing standards that’s just not going to happen, at least not in one day. The longest single trip I ever did was 773 miles (see 2006 blog). And that was fairly unpleasant.

With all that in mind, and with a nod to day 2 and 3 of the SPC forecast, we’ve decided to use today as a “getting in position day” and should we come across any weather in the 2% zone in, say Nebraska, then that would be a bonus. We’ll be in touching distance of what is likely to occur tomorrow and the day after as it will be somewhere north east. That’s just part of storm chasing, chasing every day on a trip just doesn’t happen.

I’m writing this blog offline again in the back of the Suburban. We’re about half an hour north of Canadian where we just stopped. Last night (and this morning) I had the usual battle with Wifi. Suffice to say, the Wifi at the Comfort Inn was crap. It would connect for 10 minutes even with a strong signal, and then just as I was uploading a photo it would disconnect. Over and over again. I’d even brought a LAN cable but, surprise , surprise no LAN point. Aaaagghhh!

I gave breakfast a miss (still a bit queasy) and we set of north on US 83 (83 is a very long road) after a visit to Wall-mart. A couple of people fainted at the sight of my T-shirt and shorts combo (hint: they do not go together, in fact they positively clash) so I feel I’ve accomplished something.

We stop at Shamrock with more than a subtle hint dropped to its Irish heritage.  Took some photos of its very tall water tower and a nice wall mural depicting the town’s history. Further along the main street was a restored Art Deco gas station and diner which was interesting. Camille uses her iPhone as her fun camera and is using a neat app called Instagram to make retro looking photos that look really good. There again she is a famous pro photographer and it shows!

We stopped at the aforementioned Canadian and had a nice cheese and tomato toasted sandwhich in a 100 year old diner called City Drug. I went through the somewhat pointless motions of trying to get a cup of tea. Yesterday’s confused waitress got the “hot tea” part right but failed at the milk stage as I got a glass of milk instead. Today after intensive negotiations I ended up with White Christmas herbal tea, a sort of peppermint concoction in a glass mug which I’m embarrassed to admit was quite nice.

We continued north and stopped at Shattuck home to a windmill museum which was a bit random but worth a look nevertheless. Onwards through Woodward where we saw the tornado damage from last week with the end of a building destroyed and many trees uprooted. Headed east on US 64 (avoiding the Twister Museum...) before heading north through Kansas into Hastings, Nebraska. There was a storm ahead of us and it produced some nice lightning but chasing it was pointless. I had a nice steak and a few bottles of beer at Taylors restaraunt before ending up at the Comfort Inn.

Tomorrow is likely to be north east of here which potentially means Iowa which is new territory for me and it's the birthplace of Captain Kirk! 

Total miles 500+ tbc