I understand but when you're on a chase trip thinking that the storms are going to be in western Oklahoma starting out and then you realize that the storms are actually forming in northern Texas, you're going to drive a whole heck of a lot chasing these storms down! Like I said, we originally were thinking that these storms were going to spring up somewhere in western Oklahoma and that was our original target area. We even left at 8 am to make sure we would get there in time.
Once we looked at the data more, we realized that a few of our peoples' prognostics that storms would happen in Texas were right and that we could actually get there in time; we kicked it into high gear! We ate a quick lunch at the ol McDonalds at about 11:30 am and then we were chasing the rest of the day. We were so excited because the cell we were going after was growing and at the perfect rate! It was definitely developing but not so fast that we couldn't get there in time. When we were about 20 miles outside of our intercept spot, our cell got a tornado warning. JACKPOT!
We were even more pumped as we drove further into the gloomy and dark skies. We got to one point on this storm and we could definitely see the hook and the shelf cloud. We got out of the vans, into very thick grass which apparently had snakes in it, and we put our cameras to the sky hoping for the best. We stayed there for awhile and the sky started turning green...oh yeah! This whole trip we've all been quoting Twister nonstop so of course this gave us a golden opportunity--"WE'RE GOING GREEN! Saddle up!"
Why does the sky turn green before a tornado or with severe weather? Hmm, great question! Well, the colors of anything are the ability of that surface to reflect, absorb, and/or scatter light that hits it. The sky is blue because of the particles in the air and the way that the light gets scattered on it's way to the earth's surface--in a nutshell. The sky turns a greenish color due to the hail that's coming down. Actually, we were able to see just one small pocket of the sky that turned greenish turquoise before the whole sky appeared to be that color. The way the ice balls, hail, scatters and reflects light is the ability to make the sky appear green. Hail usually accompanies tornadoes and strikes right before tornadoes so when the sky turns green you know you're getting into the vault, or "bear's cage," of the storm. This is where the hook echo occurs on the radar and in the storm--the vault. The hook looks just like that, a hook, and it appears this way on the radar because the particulates and water droplets within that part of the storm are so fine that the radar cannot detect that part of the storm. This usually occurs very close to tornado formation. Inside the hook is where the tornado usually forms and right around that is the hail formation and right around that is the precip. Therefore, when you see green, it indicates hail, which indicates the vault, which indicates a possible imminent tornado. Obviously, this isn't always the case since we saw green skies and no tornado came of this storm--it's just what happens a lot or at least sometimes.
After that side note...we decided to get back in the vans and try to get to another part of this supercell since we weren't at the best angle for seeing a tornado if one did happen to form. We saw a wall cloud and we desperately wanted to get closer since we were so far away from it. As we were driving, the most amazing thing happened...we noticed swirling dust to right of our van probably no more than 200 yards away. I know I saw it and quizzically asked, "What is that?" Everyone else saw it too but were still not sure exactly what to think. When we stopped to look at it more and take pictures, one of the guys looked up and said, "We have a rotating cloud right above us!!" Of course, I dove out of the van, pretty much literally, and stared at the sky until people were screaming for the very few of us outside to get back in the van. "We need to get out of here NOW!" a lot of people said...sad day. We got back in and drove off quickly but as we kept our eyes on that low, rotating cloud, it started to slow down and then soon dissipated...sad day again!
We've concluded that the swirling dust and the rotating cloud were probably not connected. The dust was most likely a gustnado and the swirling cloud was a thing of its own. A gustnado is a "tornado-like" phenomena that is formed by the gust front that accompanies a storm. These usually form in either the Rear Flank Downdraft (RFD) of a supercell or in the downdraft of a severe thunderstorm. They aren't the same as tornadoes and they do about F0 or F1 damage at best. Now knowing what this was and how it forms, this give us some insight into where we most likely were within the storm--the RFD since this was a supercell.
After this spectacle, we got to see a whole lot more in the way of wall clouds, strong winds, hail, lightning, and shelf clouds. It was an amazing day to say the least! It was such a long-lived supercell so we chased this thing for hours! In fact, once it finally started dissipating and losing it's rotation, it was probably about 9 pm and we still had a ways to go to get to our hotel for the night. We didn't eat dinner until about 10:30 pm that night...remember lunch was at 11:30 am and we chased since then. We checked into our hotel in Ft. Worth at midnight--hints the reason for the blog a day late ;)
What a spectacular, mentally draining, physically draining, yet disappointing day! We were SO CLOSE this time, I understand that I say that often, but we had wall clouds! There's only two one more step after that (funnel cloud) until tornado time! Hope for the best, we're out until June 9 now! Good night!
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