www.roanoke.com

Four of the Virginia Tech storm chasers ... instructor Dave Carroll and students Andrew Smith, Samantha Huddleston and Nathan Horne ... plus Maria Floyd, a South Carolina resident who helped lead the trip back in 2004 and 2005, made a sequel storm chase trip last week to capture a few days of a favorable severe weather pattern from the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest into the Ohio Valley. Some of what they found can be found by linking here to the Hokie Storm Chasers page. The original trip back in May -- that included 12 to 16 chasers at different times -- caught a lull pattern for severe weather, with only 3 storm days and really only one definitive supercell.

I didn't make this trip ... I was out of state a few days, but I was visiting family in Arkansas this time around.

UPDATE 4:45 PM SATURDAY: I don't typically do anything to promote programming on TV networks, as it's not the purpose of this blog, but it is worth noting that TornadoVideos.net successfully drove its new "Dominator" vehicle inside the same Wyoming tornado that VORTEX2 intercepted, the video of which can be found here. The Dominator is a different vehicle manned by a entirely different group than the Tornado Intercept Vehicle or TIV, though both are covered by the Discovery Channel series "Storm Chasers."  Oh, to have had another week or two in the Plains! END UPDATE

Congratulations are in order for the massive VORTEX2 tornado research team for successfully deploying around a tornado this evening in eastern Wyoming, broadcast live to viewers of The Weather Channel. Of course, those of us on last week's Virginia Tech storm chase wish it could have happened a week ago when we were still in the field, but we have time parameters and have to take whatever weather pattern is there. VORTEX2 also has a time frame that ends in a little more than a week for its 2009 operation, so no doubt a big sigh of relief for those 100-plus scientists who have patiently endured the same low-yield severe weather pattern we did the last couple of weeks. Hopefully this intercept will yield a mine of data about tornado development that will lead to better warnings and saved lives in the future.

I sometimes get asked "Why don't you storm chasers just chase the storms that happen around here?" I have a multi-part answer to that question that includes references to this area's terrain and tree cover, and the atmospheric patterns that typically yield much more powerful and photogenic storms in the central U.S. But the first part of the answer is "We DO chase storms around here." A day back from the 2-week Virginia Tech storm chase trip to the Plains states, severe storms were popping all around Southwest Virginia today. Most of these were pulse-type storms that went up and down quickly, meaning any effort to track one down would lead to getting there only as it collapsed and died. But late in the afternoon, a short bow-segment type storm with a little more longevity moved out of the Blacksburg area toward the Roanoke Valley, and I was able to get to a higher location off Electric Road in Southwest Roanoke County to get some structure shots of a stacked shelf cloud and what may have been a brief wall cloud near the southwestern flank of the storm. The bulk of this storm shifted into the northern Roanoke Valley and gradually dissipated.

Today's pop-up severe weather has yielded a cluster of severe weather reports in Southwest Virginia, including one report of a large tree blocking a road in Salem.

The Virginia Tech storm chasers returned home early this afternoon, safe and sound after a long trip in which we had to scratch unusually hard to find severe storms in the central U.S. during what is usually the peak of the severe season. But back in Virginia ... a smattering of severe thunderstorm warnings this evening for summerlike pulse and multicell storms firing over the ridges, and even (as of Tuesday evening) a slight risk of severe weather on Wednesday from the Storm Prediction Center.

I'll have a little more to share about our trip, after some needed rest. Dorothy was right: "There is no place like home."

Click here for the Hokie Storm Chase page

MASON CITY, Iowa -- We were successful in catching a couple of severe storms and even a wall cloud in South Dakota on Sunday. I'll eventually get up some photos, but it is very late (nearly 2 a.m.) now in Mason City, Iowa. We'll be up pretty early on Monday and on the road much of the next 2 days, headed back to Virginia with possibly a little more severe weather to catch in southern Iowa or central Illinois on the way. So you may not hear from me again until we're back.

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.

Click here for the Hokie Storm Chase page

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.

Click here for the Hokie Storm Chase page

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