The Times and Travels of Nolan
Documenting trips I’ve taken and places I’ve seen.
Now that TORUS 2019 is 5 (wow) years in the rearview mirror, the memories are getting a little fuzzier. Some of the big days still live on in my memory and always will. May 25, 2019 will always have a historical footnote in the great 2019 tornado outbreak sequence – but that footnote occurred hundreds …
Continue reading “TORUS 2019: Water in West Texas (May 25, 2019)”
I was rapidly running into a problem: I didn’t realize we were going to be on the road for multiple days – an initial deployment in central Oklahoma had led me to believe I would be sleeping in Norman on the night of May 22. Now it was May 24 and I was kind of …
For the first time since May 18 (and the first of many days in a row), I awoke on May 23, 2019 in a hotel room. The TORUS campaign had had some incredible highs on May 17, and some of the lowest lows in the historic May 20 and 22 busts. The latter two were …
Continue reading “TORUS 2019: A Monster in the Murk (May 23, 2019)”
We all needed a down day. May 20, 2019 had shaved months off of the lives of field researchers, forecasters, and myself. The Mangum tornado, its low visibility, the inadequate and overstressed road network, and the unexpected collapse of the rest of the severe weather outbreak left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth that night …
Continue reading “TORUS 2019: The Day It All Went Up In Smoke (May 22, 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 …
Continue reading “TORUS 2019: Oklahoma High Risk (May 20, 2019)”
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 …
Continue reading “TORUS 2019: May 18 – Excellent Shelf Life”
May 17 dawned hazy and humid, the way all great storm days should. I woke up in the Colby, Kansas Holiday Inn feeling absolutely stoked. The SPC had outlined a large enhanced risk area across much of Nebraska, including a 10% tornado probability near the warm front. After all the waiting, it was go time. …
Continue reading “TORUS: An Eventful Beginning (May 17, 2019: McCook, NE)”
As an undergraduate member of TORUS, I was only around for the duration of May. In some respects, that meant I felt the clock ticking from the moment our deployment window opened. Given that, May 15 and 16 could have come across as real bummers. Packed firmly under a 500 mb ridge, there was clearly …
I’ll never forget the moment that I learned that I had been selected to be part of a dang tornado research campaign. Elizabeth and I were on vacation, in a cab in Montego Bay, Jamaica. We hadn’t had any contact with the outside world for a couple of days, and so when she turned her …
