Today ended up being a no tornado day. It had good potential but the weather didn’t quite cooperate. Actually there was one brief tornado touchdown in SE Kansas, but that was 300 miles away.

A common misconception of chasing is that like in the movie Twister, tornadoes happen multiple times a day all over the place. There are days like that…. but maybe once every few years. On average, a chaser sees a tornado once every 10 days that they go out and chase. It’s really hard to get the proper setup, and be in the right place, at the right time.

Anyway… we got some nice pictures of some cumulus clouds, and I captured a little video of a nice cloud base on a stronger storm that I will post tomorrow.

Also a quick note, the live webcam isn’t always up and running when we are on the road. This is because we have to have internet connection from my Sprint Mobile Broadband card to broadcast the webcam. This means that sometimes when we are on dirt roads, we don’t have internet access, thus no webcam.

Another question I have received is:
What does your laptop screen look like in the heat of the chase?

I have a lot of different programs running at once including:

• My Sprint Mobile Broadband Connection to connect to the internet anywhere I have cell coverage
• The software for the webcam
• The software to connect to the Ustream to stream the webcam
• GPS Software
• The SpotterNetwork Client so that other chasers can see where I am
• Photoshop — so I can draw funny pictures for the blog
• GRLEVEL2 — a radar software package
• Threat Net — an XM delivered radar feed (for places where I don’t have Sprint)
• The internet — some of the sites that I visit the most during the chase are:
  • Stormtrack.org, which is a forum for chasers.
  • The Severe Prediction Center Mesoscale Page, an hourly updating weather analysis page that shows me how the atmosphere is changing throughout the day.
  • The UCAR Java Surface Map, which lets me look at actual observations being recorded.

There are more…but that gives you the general idea.

Avi and I are now in Gainesville, TX spending the night. The forecast for the rest of the week doesn’t look great, so tomorrow might be our last shot. The plan right now is to move towards Abilene, TX in the morning.

Pictures from today will come sometime on our drive tomorrow. It’s bedtime now.

Andy