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Click here for more on the chase trip on the Hokie Storm Chase page

We have landed in Storm Lake, Iowa, this evening, setting up for possible severe weather in the western Minnesota/eastern South Dakota region on Sunday. This does look like the highest risk of severe weather yet for the trip, but the individual severe storms may quickly become a line and race off. But we'll take our stab at it and then move on east to Virginia.

Tonight, in Storm Lake, we'll enjoy another restful evening in this wonderful little lakeside town before giving it our all on Sunday to go for whatever storms are there.

Click here for more on the storm chase page on the Hokie Storm Chase page

BELLEVILLE, Kan. -- It just wasn't moist enough. Though there was a cold front pressing south and signals of wind shear aloft we haven't seen the entire trip, dew points hung in the 40s all around us in southern Nebraska. It's hard to wring high-end storms out of that. A few did fire late in the day over northwest Nebraska, diving southeast, but by that time we were out of range, and the storms weren't particularly spectacular, anyway.

We turned in early (5:30 p.m. ... very rare on a chase trip!) at Belleville, Kansas, a small-town in north-central Kansas. We begin our long trip east back to Blacksburg on Saturday, but we will be traveling through areas that carry the potential for severe weather, so adding a chase to a long and mostly stormless trip might yet be possible.

Click here for the Hokie Storm Chase page, including blog updates and multimedia from the chase

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. --We're still chasing. Most of us, that is.

The majority of the group saw enough hints in the forecast models to continue on back to the north. This afternoon, passing through Kansas City, we completed a 6-day loop around the Great Plains.

Three students chasers needed to get back to Virginia, one for a family emergency, so Professor Bob Oliver -- driving the car we have nicknamed the "probe" -- took them back to Blacksburg. So we had the odd feeling this morning of sending one vehicle off eastward down Interstate 40 from central Arkansas, while the rest of us (12 total)  in two vans headed westward.

A few pieces are on the board for possible severe weather in Nebraska, Iowa and nearby states through the weekend, but as with everything else in this period of time for our chase, not everything is coming together perfectly. As the day progressed, some of the model output for wind shear and the potential for rotating winds looked stronger than any we've seen in the trip, so we will ferret out whatever we can find, again.

Meanwhile ... sounds like a pretty stormy day back home ...

Additionally ... going back to our chase in Texas two days ago ... here is a photo of the possible funnel cloud we observed near sunset.

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LONOKE, Ark. -- We have moved northeast from our major storm intercept in Texas on Tuesday looking at a continued rather benign weather pattern in the central U.S., with some subtle signals of possible change by the weekend into early next week. The problem: The trip is limited by time and budget, and cannot last past Wednesday at noon. So Monday would be the last potentially chaseable day, but that would mean a hard drive to get back to Blacksburg by midday Wednesday.

The major question we face: Is anything later in the week worth our staying and driving back to the north or west, or is it time to cut the trip off and head back home? We don't mind doing the wandering tourist stuff a while if there is something to wait for. But if there isn't, we don't want to spin our wheels and stretch our budget and schedules just for a meager possibility of marginal severe weather.

We meet tomorrow morning to decide that, looking at the latest weather data and other factors.

Meanwhile ... great fried catfish tonight at a local restauarant in my native state of Arkansas, a must on any trip back to my native state.

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DECATUR, Texas -- It's late and I'm tired after an exciting day for the Virginia Tech storm chase team. With the day growing late and the only meaningful storm of the evening parked directly over the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex -- somewhere we won't attempt to chase for many safety reasons -- it appeared a bust was in the offing after another small cell wheezed and whimpered. But, watching from Decatur, Texas, something amazing happened: The storm near Fort Worth split in two. One cell turned southeastward and weakened. The other spun off northward, toward us. We caught an incredible supercell with intense rotation and lowerings (including one possible funnel cloud) as it moved northward and northeastward over the counties just north of Dallas. The chased ended beside a country fence watching lightning and supercell structures over north Texas.

Virginia Tech chasers watching rising cloud tags forming a rotating wall cloud

Cloud stacks in storm north of Dallas-Fort Smith

Cloud lowering races northward over highway

Doughnut hole in evening storm clouds

Click here for more on the Virginia Tech Storm Chase 2009 from the Hokie Storm Chasers page

VERNON, Texas -- The storm chasers finally chased storms today.

Two pretty good storms, at that. Both exhibited some supercell characteristics at times, but upper-level winds were insufficient to maintain the storms for more than about an hour or two.

The first storm formed less than 20 miles from our target, Childress, Texas. We enjoyed Memorial Day afternoon at a lakeside park in Childress, waiting on the storms to begin. A few popped here and there, but the closest one just north of the park quickly developed into a strong storm with a rain-free base and a slight lowering. We pursued it northward and watched it slowly unwind near the Texas-Oklahoma border.

The second storm was over western Oklahoma, north of where we expected the biggest stuff to fire. It took us more than an hour to get close to see it, but there were some supercell-like characteristics, like a pronounced wall cloud in a forward part of the southeast-moving storm where rotation was briefly observed on radar a time or two. But this storm also fizzled over the Oklahoma prairies, leaving a pleasant evening rainbow.

Throughout the afternoon, we zigzagged in and out with the VORTEX2 procession of more than 100   about 40 vehicles, (CORRECTED: More than 100 scientists in about 40 vehicles) engaged in a massive experiment to surround a tornadic thunderstorm and measure data over five weeks. The same weather pattern that has limited our chase opportunities has restricted the opportunities for VORTEX2 to collect data on storms.

On Tuesday, we'll aim to catch something more intense and longer lasting as the best setup of the trip occurs in north Texas ... though it, too, may have some screws loose.

Click here for more on Virginia Tech storm chase 2009, including blog entries, photos, video and a locator map.

LIBERAL, Kan. -- As we made a stop in our planned drive to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, this morning, new data came in pointing to the potential for greater instability and greater wind dynamics over western Texas on Monday. So the Virginia Tech storm chase team faced a decision: Keep going to the possible marginally severe storms expected to develop over eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska, or divert immediately south so we could get to Texas by Monday afternoon.

Decisions like this are NOT made by the leaders, Dave Carroll and me, but by the student chasers. We presented the cases for and against each option, and then left the dozen student chasers to discuss, debate and deliberate on their own without our input. In the end, the jury returned a verdict, though not unanimously: Go to Texas.

So we dropped today's chase in the middle and headed south, reaching Liberal, Kansas, late this evening. The day's storm reports did not reveal much we had left behind in the Northern Plains. We'll head several hours south through the Texas Panhandle on Monday in hopes of a coming up with a Memorial Day supercell catch.

Click here for the "Hokie Storm Chasers" home page, including current tracking, blog and Twitter reports, and multimedia

OGALLALA, Neb. -- We targeted North Platte, Neb., for possible severe weather today.

This afternoon, a tornado touched down 15 miles east of North Platte, very close to Interstate 80.

But we weren't there.

We made a decision to sink south into better instability as showers and weak storms began to fire along a diffuse boundary between warm and cool air. It would prove not to be a good decision.

It was doubtful we would have been well placed to view the brief tornado even if we had headed west. But the only severe storms -- marginal as they  were -- in the region occurred in Southwest Nebraska.  We were not there, even though our initial forecasting was very good on where the best chance of severe storms would be in this extremely severe-challenged weather pattern.

Lesson learned: Don't venture too far away from the frontal boundary in this environment of limited shear and limited instability. Storms can't survive without the help that boundary provides.

We'll likely try again Sunday, probably somewhere in western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming or southern South Dakota, as the boundary lifts back to the north. Conditions for severe weather look slightly greater, but still marginal.

Click here for the "Hokie Storm Chasers" home page, including current tracking, blog and Twitter reports, and multimedia

BEATRICE, Neb. -- The piece of metal seemed to be floating in the air like a bird. But it wasn't. It was falling.

A kabooming explosion startled us. About 75 yards ahead of us, leading the 3-vehicle Virginia Tech chaser procession today, the back tire of a tanker truck exploded into shards across the multi-lane Interstate 70 in the urban tangle of St. Louis. A huge piece of crumpled metal from the truck was dropped in our lane.

And a piece of metal about the size of a car window was ejected upward, about 50 feet off the ground. Geography professor Bob Oliver, driving the small car not far behind me, likened it to watching a pop-up in baseball. But I didn't want to catch it. I aimed to miss it.

The metal crashed into the lane to my left, safely missing the van I was driving. All three of our chase vehicles were able to safely dodge metal and tire shards in the road, as the tanker veered to the right shoulder of the highway.

We had already endured two traffic tie-ups in St. Louis and would experience yet another. When the third tie-up occurred in St. Louis' western suburbs, a car in the lane to my left ended up careening into the median to avoid rear-ending the car in front of it. For a second, it appeared that car would come back out of the median, bump into a vehicle on my left, which might then bump us. Blessedly, thankfully, that didn't happen.

It all underscores a point we've often made. Tornadoes are never our biggest safety concern on the annual storm chase trip -- not even close, ranking under more common storm dangers like lightning, hail, heavy rain and high winds. But all of those rank well below our number one risk: Road travel, often in dry, beautiful weather. The greatest risk of a storm chase trip varies little from that of a cross-country family vacation or any long-distance road trip.

We are in southeast Nebraska tonight after a drive under cumulus-dotted skies that signal an increase of moisture and instability. We're still not expecting any huge outbreaks or, really, much in the way of organized severe weather. The upper air dynamics remain very weak, and show no signs of changing on a large scale for the foreseeable future.

But thunderstorms are expected to occur almost every day this week in the Rockies and the High Plains region that parallels them to the east. We're looking for the little pockets that could spin up severe weather in localized areas.

It's a difficult way to chase storms. But it's what we have.

Click here for more on the trip from the Virginia Tech "Hokie Storm Chasers" site

DALE, Ind. -- "Every hand's a winner, and every hand's a loser," sang Kenny Rogers in his 1980s hit song "The Gambler."

In storm chasing, we know that every hand can be a loser. Even in the most potent tornado outbreaks, veteran chasers are sometimes left behind without much to show for the day because of bad positioning, sudden changes in the weather pattern, or just bad luck.

This year's hand dealt by the weather pattern is full of junk (for storm chasers ... residents in Tornado Alley are pleased!). Almost every conceivable factor that could be working against large-scale severe weather in the central U.S. has been in play. But can that hand prove to be a winner for the Virginia Tech Storm Chase team? We've managed to pull off spectacular supercells every year despite being dealt some very poor cards.

We see a few clues that could lead to a little bit of heightened interest in the High Plains, all the way from Dakotas to northeast New Mexico. But pinpointing an area that might have at least an outside shot at severe, preferably rotating, storms is extremely difficult. It's a big gamble. Tomorrow, we will try to set ourselves up to move toward an area that might have a better chance of severe weather come Saturday and Sunday.

Tonight, we're in Dale, Ind. We ate a good home-style, Midwestern meal at Windell's Cafe in Dale. We met tonight and looked over some weather parameters, and will again in the morning before deciding on where to roll the dice. Tomorrow will be a travel day, and, hopefully, if we gamble correctly, we will be chasing something thunderous on Saturday.