May 29, 2004 is a red letter day in my personal weather history. That year, I decided that I would like to chase storms. I guess as a kid, I had left more like the chasee, so the thought just never occurred to me that I would want to chase them. And anyway, I was generally working the severe weather events from a forecasting or warning perspective and chasing them in Alabama is difficult anyway.
But why not go where they can be chased more readily? I am a learner by nature, and one of my other personal characteristics is “input,†which means I like to collect things. So, when I do something, I generally like to collect all the information that I can in order to learn how to do that activity. In February 2004, I attended the National Storm Chasers Convention in Colorado. There I won a Baron WX_WORX system from Baron. I thought it an omen. I also met Gene Rhoden and his wife Karen, storm chasers from Norman, Oklahoma.
Gene and Karen invited me to tag along with them if I were ever in Oklahoma, and I took them up on it. On April 30, 2004, I saw my first Plains tornado near Petrolia, Texas. Less than one month later, a big severe weather event was predicted for May 29th. I was in Baltimore. After talking to Gene, I flew west and met up with them. We went north. As we baked under a hot sun an hour south of Wichita, Kansas, the situation seemed ripe for big tornadoes. We intercepted storms near Medicine Lodge, Kansas that did not turn severe and the day looked like a bust as the sun started to go down.
We stopped to admire a lone, isolated storm in clear air over southern Kansas that had formed on the dryline. It was rotating so rapidly that I swear you could hear it. We started to head back to Oklahoma City. But that little storm, just grew and grew as it headed into deeper moisture, and we turned back to intercept it again. Just as we caught up with it, it dropped a spectacular tornado that was backlit by the setting sun four miles SW of Harper, Kansas. This same thunderstorm would produce somewhere around eleven separate tornadoes over the next hour and forty five minutes. We chased it all the way to Wichita, where darkness and traffic made it too dangerous to follow.
Fortunately, no major damage was produced by these tornadoes. It was very sobering to pull into a little small Plains town with the tornado sirens wailing, people out watching the sky, hoping their number was not coming up.
