Timelapse of Canton Lake, OK tornado.

Currently sitting in Pensacola, FL...waiting for waterspouts. Mostly. Anyway, Mike came out with a pretty sweet timelapse of the Canton/Canton Lake tornado that we intercepted May 24th...here it is!

One more tor!

Added one more tornado to my 2011 count - a short-lived, non-condensed elephant trunk near Hovan, South Dakota yesterday! Got a brief video capture of it...should have it up before I leave!

Footage on National Geographic!

Just found out that our footage from the St Louis tornadoes April 22nd made it onto the National Geographic special Tornado Swarm 2011! Check it out!

An update to explain why I won't be explaining anything for a very long time. This title is ridiculously long. Seriously, who does this?

Anyway...

I ship off to Navy basic training August 3rd. Contract signed, all hoops jumped through...time to head out. So, for now, my chasing career is over.

I'll probably be able to get out at some point next year...should be done with A school sometime in January, so...maybe eligible for some leave in June, or, at least, that's what I'm hoping. If not, 2011 was a year for the ages anyway, I suppose...

I'll leave you with a list of my top 5 tornadoes of the year:

1. Canton, OK (Big surprise)

2. Elm Creek, NE

3. Ellsinore, MO

4. Stovepipe in IA April 9th (no video)

5. Creston, IA

Quick summary...

Looks like the chase season is quickly drawing to a close...here's a summary!

March 22nd: Creston, IA tornado

March 26th: AL/MS bust, but a bust with an amazingly wrapped meso.And Risley yelling a lot. If you haven't chased with Ris, you haven't lived. 100% serious.

April 3rd: Couple of supercells/rotating wall clouds in IA...also my only speeding ticket of the season.

April 9th: 10 tornadoes in Iowa, including at least two separate times with 2 tornadoes on the ground at once.

April 10th: Crappy chase in WI...terrain cost us views of several tornadoes. Basehunters got them, though.

April 15th: Cold-core setup in IL yields a couple of funnels and cool structure.

April 19th: Never happened.

April 22nd: Chased the STL supercell/tornado from Jefferson City through STL, got a brief glimpse of the tornado over New Melle, and documented damage at the airport afterwards.

May 7th: 4 non-condensated tornadoes in eastern IL...quick spin-ups, but we were really stinking close.

May 11th: Got stuck in Kansas for either a week or a year and one week. Still not sure which.

May 22nd: Iowa crapshoot while Basehunters stole the show again.

May 24th: Canton, OK tornado. Which will probably be the best tornado of my life.

May 25th: Ellsinore, MO tornado.

June 20th: 3 tornadoes in NE, with one only 100 yards away.

And...there was a Nebraska bust in there somewhere. Forgot the date, though.

So, 21 tornadoes, 7 tornado days, a catastrophic car failure, almost got shot at in MS because of homogenized cream, and...just mostly epic. Lots of lessons learned, lots of friends made, and already counting down to next year!

Updated stats for 2011...

Updated numbers...

21 chases

21 tornadoes

8 tornado days

Over 13,000 miles

I've been in 10 states, and chased 9 of them:

Illinois (4 tornadoes)

Wisconsin

Iowa (11 tornadoes)

Nebraska (3 tornadoes)

Kansas

Oklahoma (1 tornado)

Tennessee (just passed through)

Mississippi

Alabama

Missouri (2 tornadoes)

Chase Log - 6-20-2011

Incredible chase day with my friend Roman Totten - ended up with 3 tornadoes, (bringing my total for the year to 21!), and were within a hundred yards of a beautiful cone south of Elm Creek, Nebraska.

Left Peoria at 5 AM on 1.5 hours of sleep after spending the night before at Wrigley Field watching the Cubs get embarrassed by the Yankees, and drove to around York, NE. Once there, we re-evaluated data, and kept watching a beautiful supercell on the backside of the low in NC Kansas.

To our surprise, a PDS (Particularly Dangerous Situation) tornado watch was issued for our area...surprising because these types of watches are normally saved for high risk days. I wish I had time to do some synopsis of the environments for these chase days, but that'll have to wait for winter...

We kept heading SW towards the storm in NC Kansas, as reports started to stream out of multiple large tornadoes on the ground at once. As we got close enough to see the storms' structure, I decided to target the storm developing off of the first storms' outflow boundary. This proved to be the best decision I would make all day...as we kept up with the storm heading north to the I-80 corridor, an area of rotation became apparent, and a beautiful tornado dropped!

Big day for me already, as this was the closest I'd ever been to a tornado of this size, but we followed it up with a long-distance sighting of a gorgeous elephant trunk tornado, and then a short lived rope (that we didn't get video of) to end the day!

Didn't get back home until a tad before 5 AM - almost 24 hours straight. Work the next day was absolute torture, but for what was probably the last chase of the season, it was well worth it. Sucks to have missed the epic tornadoes near our original target of York, but it worked out just fine.