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14 Apr
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April 14, 2012 – Kansas Outbreak

Nick Nolte / Blog, Storm Chasing / / 0 Comments

April 14 was the big day of the trip. Storm Prediction Center had been targeting this area for seven days and it was rather obvious when the day 1 came out with a 45% hatched tornado risk that things could get serious, really quick. We awoke in Chickasha, OK early in the morning anticipating a marathon run to southern Nebraska. We headed out at 6:30am CDT and blitzed north on I-35. Our hope was the cap would hold on to storms at the triple point until we could get there.

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13 Apr
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April 13, 2012 – Tornadoes in the Wichita Mountains

Nick Nolte / Blog, Storm Chasing / / 0 Comments

After a bust the previous day, we were looking forward to chasing this day as we were sure there would be storms. We spent the night in Dodge City, Kansas and our initial target for this day was Lawton, Oklahoma. SPC had a 10% hatched tornado risk for our target area and we left Dodge City around 1420z. We pulled into Seiling just prior to 17z to reassess data and SPC put out a mesoscale discussion for the developing Cu field that was in southwest Oklahoma. The LLJ was expected to ramp up and allow the storms to organize and a chance for tornadoes existed.

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12 Apr
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April 12, 2012 – Western Kansas Bust

Nick Nolte / Blog, Storm Chasing / / 0 Comments

Just a quick entry on this day, since it was a bust. I had driven the prior day to Kansas City to begin this little mini chase vacation of five days. The big days were expected to be Friday and Saturday, but Thursday had the potential to be a decent day before the day event. So, from Kansas City I was targetting Dodge City. SPC had a 10% tornado risk for western Kansas and into the panhandles. I met up with Skip, Jonathan, Jennifer and Brad at Subway in Dodge City to watch the data. After a bit we decided that northwest was a better spot to target and headed out that way. Eventually Jonathan and I met up with a group of other chasers and basically sat underneath a blue sky while small cumulus clouds bubbled on the dryline, but nothing really got going.

15 Mar
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March 15, 2012 – Dexter, Michigan EF-3 Tornado

Nick Nolte / Blog, Storm Chasing / / 0 Comments

This entry will be short and sweet as it kind of was a surprise event and I wasn’t expecting anything like this for this day. As such, there was no forecast that went into “finding the target.” The majority of this day was luck based, perhaps a bit on positioning skill. Other than that, there is no secret formula to how I intercepted the storm, it just kind of happened.

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02 Mar
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March 2, 2012 – Ohio Valley Tornado Outbreak

Nick Nolte / Blog, Storm Chasing / / 0 Comments

I’m a little late on this write-up as I was waiting for Louisville to finalize their storm surveys. This day had started to crop up as a potentially significant chase day several days prior to the outbreak. One of the model parameters I always check is the SREF sigtor probability and 3 days out it was forecasting 40% for the Paducah, KY area which is a pretty high value on that model.  The day before the SPC went moderate risk with a 45% hatched probability of severe weather which was recalling shades of April 27, 2011.

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