I arrived back into Albuquerque this afternoon. I won’t go into too many details, but it was a difficult two days of chasing to say the least. The 40-50mph storm motion was just too much for me to keep up with. I was under a left moving cell on Thursday that was exhibiting a great deal of anticyclonic rotation, but no tornado. I felt I was in great position on 3 separate cells on Friday, but still failed to see anything more than ragged structure and brief rotation. The fast storm motion combined with low LCLs (essentially cloud bases), fog, and stratus and really limited visibility of any organization. It felt like the equivalent of chasing a hurricane and expecting to see cloud structure. I only snapped about 15 pictures, and nothing really turned out. It was very frustrating…lots of miles and no results on a very active day. I’ve never chased such a fast paced and high-impact event like this. Chasing alone really made it difficult to navigate into favorable positions, analyze the data, keep a visual on storm features, and much less drive with all the hazards of other chasers, deer, muddy roads, 40kt synoptic surface wind gusts, and tennis ball-sized hail. Hopefully the first week of June will give me something.

Looks like a severe weather day across the central high plains on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I have off through Saturday, so I plan on chasing in SW Nebraska and NW Kansas on Thursday and Friday. This will give me a chance to utilize the great tools of the “www.spotternetwork.org“. I plan on uploading my GPS coordinates to the www.spotternetwork.org page as well as to my own website via the StormLab software. Assuming I have a wireless signal, viewers will be able to watch my position in real time as I storm chase. Below is an example of what viewers might see (this was a practice run east of Albuquerque…you can see radar imagery will also be displayed).

I plan on having this “live” image incorporated into my blog on my homepage (just like it is now except the image will hopefully only be a couple minutes old). You can see an additional explanation here. Or you can watch my location as well as hundreds of other storm spotters and chasers via the www.spotternetwork.org.

Prospects for tornadic supercells are high tomorrow with a sharp dryline and warm front meeting up around a deepening surface low. Great 0-1km helicity will be in place with plenty of mid to upper level wind shear. The only concern I have is getting to my target area in time for the action. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover to get into a favorable area. Storms will also be moving very rapidly due to a 0-6km mean wind of 40kt from the south, and motions will get much more chaotic once storms start rotating. So, it may be very difficult to keep up with them. We’ll see. Wish me luck.