Finally went storm chasing for the first time this year yesterday! It was both the most successful chase of my life, and also the scariest.
We started out in NE Nebraska. The rolling hills here make it somewhat difficult, but there was a BEAUTIFUL supercell that we couldn't pass on. When we finally got to a perfect spot on top of a hill where we could see everything, we (embarrassingly) dismissed what we saw, and assumed it was just hard to see or was rain wrapped. Well, after further analysis of the pictures today, it turns out what we saw was a GIGANTIC tornado that went through Wayne, Nebraska. It was dismissed because we just didn't think it could possibly have been that big. The preliminary talks from nws are that it has mostly EF2-EF3 damage, with some EF4 damage.
Upon leaving our perfect sight seeing spot (we needed to stay caught up with the storm), we turned around and got back on the road. Well, what did we see behind us? None other than Reed Timmer and 2 of his armored Dominator storm chasing vehicles (as well as 2 other vehicles with their caravan)!!! For those not aware, he is one of if not the most famous storm chaser in the world (many of you have probably seen him and his armored dominator cars on the Discovery show...yea, THAT guy, and THOSE vehicles were right behind us). Not a minute after we let him pass us, they pulled over. Shortly after that, Reed Timmer actually went to the hospital (unfortunately) for a seizure (not related to the storms).
Now, lets go to part 2. We didn't like what was happening with the Wayne supercell. Another supercell was coming up on it fast. Not only are we not too familiar with the weather behind merging cells, we wanted nothing to do with the immense amount of rain that would be associated with this (as well as making it an incredibly dangerous tornado to chase). We decided to ditch this storm, and go for another supercell that was not far away. This second supercell was already tornado warned, and had a pretty good couplet associated with it. There was a very clear debris ball on the radar as well very shortly after. As we were approaching it, we had to come in from behind. We had a perfect road, but we had to make the choice of whether to gun through the hail core and make it to the east side and (hopefully) get a perfect image of a gigantic tornado (reports were already coming in that there was a very large tornado), or to let the tornado pass in front of us, very quickly speed up, and hopefully get some good sightings from the southeast side. I was insistent to my chasing buddy (who was driving) that we let it pass ahead of us. Not only did I not want to deal with getting hailed on, I did not feel safe by any means whatsoever attempting to pass right in front of an enormous couplet that could (and likely was) producing a very large and deadly tornado. Regardless of this, he still drove a little faster than I wanted him to. Ironically, we did miss the hail core, but while on the SW side of the couplet, the tornado was actually whipping hail all the way from the core over to us (the tornado cannot be spotted due to being rain wrapped, but we know that we are EXTREMELY close to it due to the RFD winds and rotating winds not far in front of us). Well, thank god I had my buddy slow down enough to let it pass in front of us, since video we have seen from somebody on the other side (and spotter reports) indicate this tornado was also at least a mile wide. The damage we saw was completely flattened corn fields and entire forests having all the trees snapped in half. I'm guessing nws will indicate it was an EF3 tornado (possibly as high as EF4). Had we been in this thing, not only several hundred feet behind it, it is very unlikely we would have gotten out without injuries.
We did do a tiny bit of chasing after this, but for the most part, after this, our chase had concluded (the tornadic element of the storms was gone).
The lesson learned (and I'm glad I did it this way based on my own intuition), is ALWAYS, when doing something dangerous such as storm chasing, make sure safety comes first. It isn't worth a life to do something like my friend wanted to do and gun it through a hail core, risking your own life, just to see a better view of a tornado.
