Each day (depending on how much time I have available), I will blog about my storm chase during the last week of June, 2017. This blog is a record of day -1 (minus one), Saturday, June 24th. The actual tour begins on day 1 (Monday, June 26th). An ambitious goal will be for me to post the GPS log and some pix on EveryTrail or something similar. However, realistically this will be done later after the trip.
On Saturday the 24th, Heidi and I excitedly flew to Denver to chase storms for the upcoming week. Or sight-see, depending on whether mother nature will cooperate with us (more on that further down).
Kids have so much energy. The ones behind us kept me awake for most of the flight. Heidi reports the girl kicked the back of her seat repeatedly.
I needed a new camera bag, so we took Lyft to Best Buy. Lyft is wonderful, just use the app, no calling 411 to get a cab company who will hem and haw over such a small fare. I bought a good bag (cheap, too!), and then we walked about a half mile to Chili's and took Lyft back to the hotel.
Why Lyft and not Uber? Because the people at Uber are assholes, that's why.
It's really hard to eat at Chili's while you're trying to lose weight. Especially on Weight Watchers. They have a three course meal for $10. Sounds great, right? Comes out to 1800-2800 calories depending on what you choose. Most entrees are over 1000 calories.
Their "healthy choices" are half our daily allowance of Weight Watchers points. Fortunately, we were able to eat only half, and we're going to have half for lunch today. We're saving our splurge for our orientation barbecue tonight (Sunday, 6/25/17).
Of course, trying to not gain weight on a storm chase is nearly impossible. We'll see how it goes.
I always have reading for work (I'm an author) to do, but lately none of it has been anything I wanted much to read (either it's not my cup of tea, or I just don't think it's very good). But this is vacation! So I purposely only brought IT by Stephen King. 500,000 words of sheer delight! It's all I have to read, and there's no way I'll finish it (since I can't read while in a moving vehicle--it makes me nauseous) during the week.
Should I mention the forecasts that I'm looking at for the week? Even though I'm afraid I could jinx things, looking at the long-range forecasts is part of the fun! Well, it is for me. These storms are so unpredictable that what I'm about to say is really just fun speculation.
So here goes . . . according to the Storm Prediction Center at NOAA, predicting three days out (which is hard to do and not terribly accurate), there's a slight risk for severe thunderstorms (slight risk is actually very good, it means we should definitely intercept some; slight risk means a 15% chance of encountering one within a 25-mile radius, and with over a hundred thousand square miles of risk . . . the math works out well for us) in Nebraska and South Dakota on day 2 (Tuesday). However, they do not expect tornadoes. Otherwise, their unofficial guidance is for severe storms for days 3 and 4, but not much for days 5 and 6. But their official guidance for those four days is the predictability is too low to really know (of course, the outlook for day 2 is also uncertain, but they seem to be required to give that one their best shot). Day 1 (Monday) doesn't have much potential at all. Unfortunately, that's the most certain forecast. We'll probably use the day to drive to Nebraska or South Dakota.
Interpreting the GFS weather model, I think days 5 and 6 look good as well, but that's really difficult to predict this far in advance, and I assume the SPC knows better than me ( But that doesn't stop me from having fun with it! :-) ). Still, we may get five chase days out of six! But that's probably the best that we can hope for. My guess is it will be hard to find a tornado this week, but easy to find a photogenic super cell in the upper Midwest plains. I'll take that for the final week of June! Especially since the year has been really sparse for severe storms (bad for storm chasers but good for EVERYONE ELSE).
From my interpretation of the GFS (I suck at this, but it's fun anyway to try), day 2 (Tuesday) looks good in south central South Dakota (though Manitoba looks good as well, which isn't in the SPC coverage), days 3 and 4 (Wednesday and Thursday) look good in southeast Nebraska, day 5 (Friday) looks good in southeast Kansas, and day 6 (next Saturday) looks good in southwest Minnesota.
Keep in mind, I've only briefly texted with Roger (the tour guide) about the forecast, and the only thing he said was the week should be good, and we'll be around ND, SD, NE, MN. I'm sure he'll straighten me out later and tell me where the storms will really be.
I've never chased in the Dakotas or Minnesota before. I hope we can this week!
Tomorrow is a lazy day. As I said, there's an orientation barbecue, but otherwise no plans. Lots of Stephen King for me!
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