Previous post Friday, June 5. Elizabeth pulled out from the parking garage in Denver, and with pinpoint navigation from Michael and myself, headed westward through Denver until she reached I-70. Looming directly ahead was the starkness of the Front Range – a phenomenon that really can’t be described unless you’ve driven that stretch of 70. …
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TORUS 2019: Oklahoma High Risk (May 20, 2019)
I’ve been inside two SPC High Risks in my life. One was on my 16th birthday – November 17, 2013 – and ended with me within a few miles of a heavily rain-wrapped EF2 tornado near Kokomo, IN. And then… there’s May 20, 2019. I’ve never seen a day like it. This was the day …
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Christmas Break 2020-2021: Great Smoky Mountains National Park (among other things)
This post is just intended to summarize an eventful few weeks of my Christmas break. It includes five driving days, two dog vomits, one national park, and one violent insurrection against the government of the United States. Enjoy! My Christmas break began on December 17, right when I finished off a (long) dynamics final exam. …
TORUS 2019: May 18 – Excellent Shelf Life
Has a field campaign ever started off hotter than TORUS did in 2019? A day one cyclic tornadic supercell, well-sampled – it’s hard to beat. And there was an incredibly active period upcoming, with more opportunities to deploy in the next week and a half. The morning 500 mb map from May 18 just screams …
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Summer 2020: Denver
The freedom of the open road at the beginning of summer can’t be beat. That is, unless your open road is a horribly inefficient route. Yes, Elizabeth and I were on our way to Denver on June 4. We were going to stay the night with her cousin, Michael, and his girlfriend, Irene. We brought …
Adventure Summer: Carlsbad Caverns National Park
This (long-awaited) post will pick up where the previous post left off. Hiking the tallest mountain in the state of Texas leaves you proud, but hungry. Elizabeth and I finished our descent of Guadalupe Peak late in the afternoon of July 14, 2018. Sore thighs, sore feet, but proud of one of the biggest physical …
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2020 Year In Review
I’ve spent the past week or so thinking of how I’m going to write this post. I doubt that “year in review” posts are ever easy for the author. After all, articles or blog posts or whatever are supposed to be thematic, right? Everything that happened within the year controlled within one tight narrative, with …
Storm Chasing 2020: All of the Rest
I’ve written up chase logs of each of my favorite six storm chases from a pretty quiet 2020 – the April 11 supercell near Haskell, TX; the April 21 big hailer near Canadian, TX; the April 22 large tornado near Springer, OK; the May 13 shelf cloud in southwest OK; the May 22 weak tornadoes …
Meet Scipio
Elizabeth and I have a puppy! We adopted him on October 30, and the last month or so has been a never-ending battle of spray bottles, carpet stains, chewed socks, and way-too-fancily named dog treats. Scipio is 3 and a half months old, is an Australian cattle dog mixed with a Pomeranian, and has completely …
Chase Log: August 31, 2020 – A Hailer At Home
Sometimes, you travel to chase the storm. Sometimes, the storm hits your home. On the last day of August of this year, we got a little bit of both – a Highway 9 supercell that stalled right over Norman and produced some of the wildest weather I saw in what was a pretty crazy year. …
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