Yesterday was one of the most exciting chase days I have ever had and once again it was thanks to some excellent forecasting by Dan and a little help from A couple of other chaser friends Jock and Lisa. Read on for a taste of what it was like.

The forecast yesterday was described by one storm chasing blog as a “crapshoot”. We had a tough call picking our target area as it was a choice between NW Kansas/ SW Nebraska or the Texas Panhandle with no obvious benefit to either we went South since if all else failed we would end up in a good place for todays chase.

First stop on the drive South was Liberal Kansas home to Dorothy’s house from the wizard of OZ.

There was no sign of the house just her mailbox presumably because the house is in OZ....

After a quick pit stop in Liberal we kept on heading South until Amarillo where after a short break for lunch and a quick look at the models we decided to head South towards the town of Tulia TX. It was in Tulia that we spent most of the afternoon, the dry line which was moving East was our target for the Day so we had to play the waiting game and we weren’t alone.

Spot the storm chasers! They are the people in cars with lots of antennas on the roof.

After a couple of hours and a few short scouting drives East and West to check out the sky we were joined by Jock and Lisa who helped us make the call to head East towards a couple of storms that had already fired up- it turned out to be a good call!

This was our storm for the day just north of Turkey TX

The storm we were chasing was pretty messy so our only choice to see some action was to get up close and personal We pushed on North into the belly of the beast.

First stop was at the intersection for the road East to Plaska Lodge where we saw a funnel cloud rotating a few hundred meters to our North.

We met a chaser later in the day who was a bit braver than us and saw the same area of the storm put down a tornado around 2 miles away from where I took the following picture and video.

This rotated across from us to the North- exciting!

After the wall cloud rotated over us we found ourselves right in the core of the storm for the first time this trip. This experience was pretty intense and definitely got the adrenaline flowing!

We were right on the edge of a tornado warning. Compare this screenshot to the one further down the page to see how quickly the storm to our South developed.

After this got a little itense for us we headed back toward Turkey to get a look at the storm from a slightly safer distance.

You can see a gustnado spinning down the river bed in this.

Now we had a choice, do we head back toward Amarillo for the night or keep the chase going and chase through to Childress? There was only one problem with heading to Childress We had to drive between 1 tornado warned supercell to our North and another severe warned storm to our South, we didn’t quite make it and got sandwhiched between both!

If you look closely at the blue circle (which is us) you can see purple on the radar this indicates the highest intensity part of the storm, the video below was shot at the same time.

The video below is what it was like from inside the core of the storm. You can also hear some pretty insightful commentary from me.

We didn’t get any further East after Jock spotted rotating couplets on the radar, instead we bravely ran away! Although the drive through the storm was pretty exciting too!

We found daylight after about 15 minutes of driving notice how light it is compared to the videos!

After bravely running away we had a spectacular drive through Palo Duro Canyon on the way back to Amarillo and a nice warm bed!

Thanks to Dan for another awesome day of forcasting and Jock for getting us right into the thick of it!

Let’s see what today will bring!