05.23.10

Update on May 18 Chase – Two Tornadoes

Posted in Uncategorized at 7:38 pm by Rebekah

Photos and a full chase log from May 18 are up on the website; however, you may want to wait to access the photo page…

Unfortunately, as soon as I copied over the photos and updated chasing pages, I lost access to my ftp site and I can’t seem to get it back right now.  This has prevented me from copying over the updated home page and full page for displaying the May 18 photo thumbnails.  It’s rather frustrating, but it would appear that I will just have to wait and hope I am able to access it again soon.  You can still go to the website, click on the storm chasing tab, and go to the May 18 photo page…it just looks funny right now as the thumbnails are not showing up and the background is white.

Hmph.

If you wait to look at the page until tomorrow, hopefully I will have been able to copy over the full photo page to make it look nice.  If not, you’ll know why.

Photos and a chase log from May 19 should be up sometime early this week.

On a related note, when reviewing photos to post this afternoon, I compared the NWS Amarillo tornado reports and survey info from Tuesday with the timestamps on my photos.  I found that one of the tornadoes occurred as I took a few photos after the mesocyclone left Dumas.

According to the NWS, there was a 200-yard tornado 2 miles east of Dumas from 6:42 to 6:45 pm.  I was several miles south of the storm, looking north to the area just east of Dumas, when I saw one of many bowl-shaped lowerings.  I was too far away to tell if it was a tornado or not, but I snapped some photos.  One of the photos, taken at 6:43 pm, shows a cone tornado on the ground!  I had to enhance the contrast in the photo by quite a bit, but hey, sometimes that’s what you need to know for sure…

As the time, location, and description matches, and the funnel cloud in my enhanced photo was indeed touching the apparent ground, it’s pretty safe to say that Jeff and I actually saw TWO tornadoes on Tuesday–albeit both low-contrast, mostly rain-wrapped tornadoes.

This is a bit of a milestone for me, since if all the tornadoes I think I’ve seen were indeed tornadoes (a few may not have been, granted, but I’m pretty convinced they all were), I’ve now seen 20 tornadoes.

On a related note, Wednesday, May 19th, was my 40th chase (my first tornado was not seen on a chase, though…it went right past my house…).

Not that it matters much, however, especially as I don’t really measure the success of my storm chases on whether or not there were tornadoes.  I’d still MUCH rather see amazing storm structure or large hail (not falling on my car, mind you!) than low-contrast, rain-wrapped tornadoes.  Just the same, if a supercell I’m on is actually producing tornadoes, I’d prefer to see at least one.  😉  In the case of Wednesday, though, if I’d seen one of the southern tornadoes, I probably would have missed out on one of the most amazing sunsets (pics coming soon)…

But I digress.

Note: contrast is still not very good on the following image (you may click to enlarge), and the enhanced contrast means a more pixelated image, so you may need to squint and tilt your head a bit to see the cloud reaching the ground.  😉

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