September 30 turned the entire 2026 chase season around… topping the list, it gave me the top goal of this year, my 30th season, and that was to hit 500 tornadoes! It was the goal I set right out of the gate; I was 26 away, and I knew that was a lofty number, only 8 of my prior seasons saw more than that, so almost two-thirds missed that mark. But I knew it was reachable if the season performed well, and I wanted more than anything else this year to hit that tornado milestone on this milestone year. And thanks to a rather long list of birdfarts and half-ass dust whirls, I accumulated the numbers, and even got a pair of September Colorado tornadoes to get me within three. It wouldn’t take an outbreak day at that point, and I got one anyway. I needed three, I got eight. And the third was among the better looking tornadoes and allowed me the other part of that goal, to get a picture in front of it. Was it the most photogenic, nope? But I didn’t want that… I wanted one I could pose in front of and you could see it. I got exactly what I asked for. And, above ALL that; none of these tornadoes were impactful, most traveling harmlessly through open fields with a couple outbuildings hit. That’s it… a tornado chasers biggest want, no impacts.
This chase also goes down as my best ever September chase. September had been a rather dry month for me over the years, only having seen a couple tornadoes in the month, with my ‘best’ being a cigar shaped tube on a lunch break from my Marco’s pizza shift that I snuck out to grab. I had two earlier in the month, one birdfart landspout, and one rather large tornado that spun up under merging storms, but wasn’t terribly photogenic, or visually obvious. This chase, on the final day of September, goes into the books as a ‘Second Season’ fall chase, probably in the top 3 of all my autumn chases behind another Kansas fall chase and the famous Quakenado chase, and honestly, I would put this one ahead of Quakenado as my #2 all time second season chase. And give it time, I may even make it my number 1. Haha I like to sit on these big decisions for a while and let recentcy-bias sway me. But it’s hard to argue… eight tornadoes, several photogenic ones, 500th… yeah, it could be the best fall chase.
Obviously the three photogenic tornadoes exceed anything I have quality-wise in September, so that’s an easy win there. I finally have as tornado I would put on a calendar, probably three, for this month. Going in, not really any. It was a low bar, but it has been blown away.
This doesn’t throw 2026 into the top 10 best seasons ever.. on paper, 31 tornadoes on the year is my 6th best, but remember that less than 10 were of quality. But there were a couple solid chases in there. The epic summer of lightning also helped elevate this season from the bottom rankings a bit, but this firmly puts 2026 in the middle, a feat on its own barely worth a mention, but remember only a few months back when this season was a bottom 3 since 2002, so it’s a big mention that it’s moved up so fast thanks to what the back-end of the year has done for me. A large chunk of that upward slide comes from accomplishing the season’s biggest goal coming in, and that was 500. And I did it on arguable the best central plains tornado event of the season.
There is a universe where fresh-off-Nor’easter coverage Tony stays home and sits this out, letting the idea of no instability and maybe a meh birdfart or two too far from home talk him out of going. That Tony would probably be in pretty bad shape right now. But this Tony went out despite the tiredness, fought through a slowly-growing case of the cruds and a raw throat, and stuck to his target, and while yes, could’ve left 30 minutes earlier and perhaps caught the day’s first tornado, I imagine everything played out exactly how it was suppose to. In the end, I walked out of this day with the best chase of 2026, a bar that was pretty low going in, but this day would’ve competed with quite a few lesser top days of some decent years.
2026, I take back all the rotten things I said about you… in the end, you came up big. And if this was the final outing for the year, it ends with a wonderful win…
This is why we play the game…
