May 15, 2006
A weird chase day
We began our chase trip to the west Sunday by heading east.
Dave Carroll and I made a decision to spend the first day of our chase trip purusing storms in North Carolina rather than traveling through placid weather to the west. This was unprecedented in the history of the student chase trips that Carroll has led off and on during the last 15 years for high school and college students.
We barely had everyone picked up at Blacksburg and Pulaski when severe thunderstorm warnings started flying for the New River Valley. But we wanted none of these storms, as they were clustering together. We passed through Roanoke at about 11 a.m. (did you see our maroon, antenna-laden vans?) as we headed south to Danville for re-evaluation.
From Danville, we spent the next 6 hours chasing a series of severe storms in North Carolina. We encountered hail and rotating clouds, then late in the afternoon, intercepted a spectacular tornado-warned thundestorm over metro Raleigh-Durham. We even spotted and photographed a funnel cloud (video still at top, by Jacob Carley) from a parking lot in Durham.
It was a strange day ... heading east on the first leg of a trip to the Great Plains, chasing in trees and hills, and across a metro area. But it gave all the students a crash course in chasing, and made for a couple of very tired drivers!
Now, we will really head west and see if this pattern can yet change and yield some severe storms on the open Plains.
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