Down Time In Texas And New Mexico

My Top 3

One aspect of chasing that I hadn’t anticipated before hitting the road was the amount of down time one might experience between storms. Our last chase was Wednesday, May 14, when we nearly caught a tornado near Big Springs, Texas. Since then, however, the weather system that triggered that storm, as well as several others that day, cycled down. This means that the cold front dropped well into Mexico, wiping the atmosphere of much of its moisture, which you need to have tornadic storms. The next trough brining in Gulf moisture may not appear until Tuesday or Wednesday of this next week, and even then the computer models aren’t predicting tornadic potential until Thursday through Sunday.

So what is a group of storm chasers to do when there are no storms? Drive–a lot–looking for the stray LP, or low precipitation storm, that might display lovely cloud formations and some small hail. And if that’s not possible? Then we become tourists, like we were yesterday in Roswell, New Mexico. That’s right, the storm chases set their sites on an alien crash site, which, interestingly, was later said to be merely the remnants of a weather balloon that had crashed just outside the air force base. Another interesting connection to storms: the supercells that produce tornadoes are affectionately called “mother ships” because of their size and rotation when hovering over the landscape. The running joke yesterday? “I went to Roswell and probed a mother ship.” Of course, the only thing we “probed” with our portable Doppler radar were a few LPs that dropped a few rain showers on Roswell.

The other aspect of chasing that I hadn’t anticipated is the lack of time for writing. Since we’re in the vans for anywhere from 8 to 10 hours each day, even on “down time,” we’re left with very little time for ourselves. A usual day begins around 7:30 for me. I shower, go for a walk, grab some coffee and re-pack all of the stuff that I unpacked the night before. We meet at 9:00 to go over weather data or the plans for the drive and then leave the hotel around 10:30 or 11:00, heading out across hundreds of miles of open states–waiting. We may or may not stop for lunch, but we always seem to pull into the hotel no earlier than 7:00 (on chase days it’s usually around 11:00 pm), which means a late dinner and phone calls and e-mails to family and friends.

As a writer hoping to chronicle the chase, I rely heavily on my notes and my iPod recorder to capture the specifics of each day–but the larger trends in my thinking are sadly neglected. I’m the kind of person who needs extended periods in front of a computer to make sense of the details. It’s a luxury I don’t have right now. My plan is to spend the few weeks after I return from the chase writing out my thoughts in long hand on the computer and then letting them mull for a while (maybe a few more weeks) while I enjoy the summer with my two boys, Dane and Kevin. I don’t think I’ll plan to travel anywhere by car for a good long while.

PS today we’ll cross the border of the Oklahoma panhandle into Kansas, which for those of you who know me, is perhaps one of the more meaningful times of this trip. It’s been nearly three years since I called Kansas home, and I’m eager to return for a few days.