Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars

Quick evening note; will travel my way out I-70 tomorrow, leaving a bit earlier in the morning than I would for a typical ‘travel day’ just in case a storm can get going in central Kansas in the afternoon; not expecting a ton out of it, but given the Sunday setup, this sets me up well.   Initially thought about cruising into Burlington mid-afternoon to see if the storms in Colorado would be worth anything, and I am just not convinced they’ll amount to enough to dedicate missing any central Kansas potential, nor sacrificing a full day’s drive out east.  Some CAMs are trying to spark a couple storms in central Kansas tomorrow, and it’s a halfway decent environment if a storm can get going.  So that said, an early departure from home to head out east, and maybe we’ll land in Hays for a late lunch and see where things are.

Looks like things will kick off for me tomorrow… I sat out yesterday and today, and while I am not formally planning to chase tomorrow as I am playing it as a positioning day, there are some potential storm interactions I could have in far eastern Colorado tomorrow afternoon, so I’m not writing off tomorrow yet, but it’ll likely be a ‘just cause I’m there’ type of thing.

As I eluded to in my previous entry, nothing in the coming days looks ‘HISTORIC’, or end of the world.  As is typical with these things, there is a lot of click-bait and crazy eye popping headlines.  Sure, it’s going to be active with severe weather possible to likely every day through mid-week (possibly beyond), but right now, I don’t have a day that I would be sounding alarm bells for.  If you know me, or have followed me for a while, you know I’m not a hype-man, I’m not going to get all goo-goo over setups days in advanced just to stir up engagement.  It’s never been my style.  I think I kinda try and stay in my lane, focus on the CHASING aspect, not so much forecast and Meteorologist and stuff.  A lot chasers have expanded into forecasts, and warnings on a national level, and some do it very well (coughLuciocough), but so many others, not so much.  Me, if you go to my social media, it is VERY chase-focused, and occasionally I will poop out some forecast-type stuff, but it’s all focused on chasing.  There are plenty of good places people can go to get good weather information, particularly for their local regions.  We got a guy here who lives up the street from me, Kody, who has an EXCELLENT Facebook page with great forecast info for northern Colorado and Idaho, and I advise folks all the time to find a trusted source like that in their local areas as they have good insight with no BS.  Me, if you’re following me, you’re following me for chasing, the pictures, and occasionally my 2-cents on the forecast ahead.  And yes, I will provide some hyper-local info on pending setups to areas I am tied to (Ohio, southern Illinois, Kansas, and of course, Northern Colorado).  Anyway, tangent over…

As for tomorrow, I’m watching two areas… the on-my-way pickoff across eastern Colorado; low potential, probably a low-end hailer near the CO/KS border along I-70.  And the more effort-heavy areas across southeast Nebraska/northeast Kansas.  Right now, CAMs are not terribly high on that area, and it’s a big investment to make that haul, so I need to see something a bit more promising for me to pull that trigger.  I won’t sleep completely on it as these surface low setups, while not terribly optimistic in the models, can be sneaky, and can be good, so it’s not a 100% write-off at this point, but I will need to see something a bit more optimistic before I commit to that.  Given my preliminary target for Sunday, my first REAL chase day is gonna be southern Kansas/northern Oklahoma, the southeast Nebraska target would make for an easy get, basically a straight south drop on US-81.  So it doesn’t hurt me for the day that counts, so I’ll keep tabs on it through the day and decide if it’s worth a 7am alarm on a Saturday for, or if I just play lazy and try and catch something out on I-70 tomorrow, which also would be an easy get for Sunday.

As for the weekday setups, I think they progressively get more… better(?)… as the week goes on… Tuesday and Wednesday, depending on your model of preference, seem to be the pinnacle of this stint, with solid days surrounding that.  How long into next week I am out remains to be seen, but right now, it certainly looks like I’ll be out through Wednesday at least, and we’ll see what persists after that.  Again, not going to blow smoke up anyone’s butt about how ‘end of the world’ any of these setups are cause there really isn’t a lot of smoke to blow.  All setups have high ceilings, and I could cherry-pick all the good things I want from them and ignore all the negatives to pump it up, but alas, just know if you’re in a risk area this week, that you’re in a risk area this week haha Regardless, I will be out, and I will see where I think the best chase setups will be within those larger setups.  I am definitely leaning north on all the days, but we’ll see what shakes out.

Lastly, my new vlog has posted today!  Head over to my YouTube channel and you can watch the full Vlog from the April 10, 2005 Cold Core tornado chase in northwest Kansas.  This day yielded my first favorite tornado photo, which you can see above!  It was a fun chase that began late the night before as me and a friend outran an eastern Colorado blizzard to arrive at a I-70 hotel at 5:30am and slept in sleeping bags on the floor of the hotel room.  Hahaha  Click here to go watch it!  I have my chase log posted here as well, you can also go check that out!  The Vlog is posted at the top of the chase log, too! 😀

Busy stretch looks to shape up heading into this coming weekend, and it may extend well into next week.  Saturday through Monday look like high-likelihood chase days, with Thursday, Friday, and Tuesday also presenting some opportunity.  Still working out the details and logistics on what days will be my focus, and when I would depart to set up for them, so plenty left to uncover as the days go on.  Depending on where you get your weather information, this could be the ‘tornado outbreak of the year’?  Yeah, I don’t speculate on the high-side potential of these events.  As we’ve seen from the last trip, high ceiling setups on the models don’t always yield the high-ceiling results, so it’s basically my motto to see what I see when I see it.  But regardless, solid chase opportunities look to unfold this coming weekend, so I’ll definitely be keeping tabs on things in the days to come.

Also, if you haven’t been to my YouTube Channel since the ‘first chase upload‘, I post my March 10 Vlog from the historic hail event in Kankakee, Illinois!  This Friday, seeing as it falls perfectly on the 21-Year anniversary of the April 10, 2005 cold core tornado event in Kansas, that will get this week’s post.  I cleaned up and added some new footage to that chase event, so that will go live this Friday morning, so be watching for that to post the end of the week!

Just a quickie for this afternoon… wanted to drop an update about the upcoming chase potential and plug my channel!  Will have more details for this potential upcoming chase trip in the coming days.  Meanwhile, I gotta get ready to go see the Super Mario Galaxy Movie 😀

Thanks to Ed for taking the wheel early this grey Saturday morning… we’ve wrapped up a busy three days of chasing and have just left Peoria, Illinois to begin our long haul back home to Colorado.  It was a pretty packed slate of storms for us, although nothing terribly big, despite some high-ceiling setups.  I’ll have those inked out in the coming days, so be sure to check out the chase logs for those.  While we did see a couple birdfart tornadoes on Thursday in Iowa, I think Friday was actually my favorite of the three chase days as the storm we documented made for an early candidate for Storm Structure of the Year for me.

A couple notes on the Iowa tornadoes on Thursday.  With the two seen, I have now seen at least one tornado in Iowa each of the last 6 years dating back to 2021.  This was once a state I could never see a tornado in despite my best attempts.  I had seen two even lesser tornadoes prior to 2021 in my entire career, and since 2021, it’s arguably one of my best states now.  Neither tornado was ‘wall-worthy’, but they were among the best that day had to offer.  Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska have seen 7-year streaks in the mid 2010s, and Colorado sits at five years going into this year, so both Iowa and Colorado have been among my better chasing states since my return to Colorado in 2021.  Kansas holds my all-time state streak with 10 years straight from 2007-2016.  Kansas has been a tough cookie in recent years, certainly dropping out of the top state, while still sitting easily in first place overall with number of tornadoes seen (143; Colorado in distant second at 81).

The Riverside tornado in Iowa on Thursday I aired live on AccuWeather, meaning I have aired at least one tornado live each year I’ve been out with them since 2021, my entire stint with the company.  My first live tornado was the Virgil, Illinois tornado in August of 2021, just a few months after I started.  In total, I’ve aired 22 tornadoes live on the network since 2021, including some high-profile events such as Akron 2023, Yuma 2023, Defiance/Harlan 2024, among others.

I’ll be closing in on about 9,000 chasing miles when I pull into my driveway at home, likely tomorrow.  It’ll get in the top earliest high-mileage seasons I’ve had, although I’ll have to dig a bit deeper to figure out exactly where that falls.  Honestly, it may be middle-of-the-road; but first week in April to be approaching that mark is pretty good for me.  This thanks to what I believe is now three round-trips to the Midwest since February.  Certainly has been an active start.  I should get a breather at least through mid-week, and we’ll see what the next system has to offer up.

I’d say the vehicle setup is about 90-95%… I need to make a few tweaks to the setup, but all-in-all, I am very happy with how things are setup.  The tablet is such a nice change from the laptop and not only saves room, but extra gadgets.  The trackball, which was always a pain, no longer needs to be velcro’d to whatever random surface.  The tablet is a no-gadget screen that runs radar, navigation, and anything else I need.  The new dash mount; awesome.  Still need to make some tweaks, but I can set it up where it holds the camera in place, but at the same time is moveable to aim it wherever I need to.  Both in-car action cams look great and work real well.  This trip didn’t offer up anything particularly Vlog-worthy, but may offer some short form opportunities.  Yesterday, despite having some excitement going into the day, I didn’t shoot much vlog stuff as I felt it, too, was going to fall short.  But the testing is proving for really nice results, both for the physical setup and some of the apps I am working on.  Will be eager to fine-tune a few things in the off time coming up.  This was the first trip that required the two-person setup, which definitely needs some cleaning up, but the extra space in this Ascent verses my previous Forester DEFINITELY is so nice.

Speaking of my ride, I am getting a cargo LED light upgrade kit installed this week.  I do a lot from the back of this vehicle, and the factory lights are damn near worthless.  The LED will allow me to actually see what’s going on back there, especially at night when I may be doing some nighttime shooting, or even setting up live shots, and not having to fumble with a flashlight or phone light will be HUGE.  I am very excited to get that in.

That’s about all I got for this entry… we’re about to roll into the Quad Cities, and will venture over to the World’s Largest Truck Stop there on I-80 in Walcott, Iowa.  That’ll be our fuel stop.  Illinois has a much higher rod tax on fuel which has the prices around $1 or more per gallon that what we find here in Iowa, so fortunately I only had to pour a quarter tank of Illinois-priced fuel in during yesterday’s chase, so yay for that.  Ed has never been, so we’ll cross that off his bucketlist today as we aim for about 2/3 of the way home today, probably stopping somewhere between Grand Island and North Platte.  Goal is for both of us to be home in time for Easter dinner tomorrow.

See ya soon!

As my cute, new little widget over there on the right shows, I’ve got several chase days lined up starting tomorrow.  Spent most of the afternoon yesterday getting the ride ready to rock.  She’s been dormant since returning from Illinois, so almost two weeks.  Actually managed to keep the driving limited to a single full tank of gas during that stretch, nice cause the 87 octane here is the mid-grade, so it’s $4+ right now here in northern Colorado without fuel points chipping away at some of that.  Fortunately the 87 octane becomes regular unleaded across the border, so that’ll somewhat alleviate that wallet thief.  It’s like 2022 all over again…

So quick and dirty as I have some honey-dos to knock out before I venture out.  Likely going to take the northern route via I-70 out to Kansas today; I’m leaning toward a play on Wednesday across western Oklahoma into southern Kansas, and the original out-of-the-box idea was to hit up Amarillo tonight, but I think I-70 works.  There’s also chatter, albeit limited compared to previous events, about potential northern lights, which would be much more attainable along I-70 as opposed to I-40, so we’ll keep that option open should that evolve tonight.  I haven’t looked at a cloud forecast, so who knows, but it’s pretty low on the go-get-‘er scale at this point.

WEDNESDAY: As I mentioned, likely western Oklahoma into southern Kansas.  I think there’s a very high ceiling to this event, but still pretty conditional for tornadic supercells.  Should have no issues getting on storms, so likely something to play with, but we’ll see how the tornado chances evolve.

THURSDAY: Northeast from Wednesday, probably looking east of Des Moines, maaaybbbeee as far as into Illinois?  I dunno; another high ceiling, messy setup, but honestly between the three days, COULD be the better of the three?  It’ll be a haul to get over there, so we’ll see where things end up tomorrow night, but that’s the going plan.

FRIDAY: Largely undecided at this point exactly how far south and west we’ll venture from end-of-day Thursday, so I don’t have a Hard Target (great movie, BTW) picked out for Friday yet, but plenty of time to make that adjustment.

SATURDAY: It’s a maybe… if a solid tornado threat lines up near Ohio and we’re within shooting distance, I’ll see if its worth taking the shot.  Right now, I’d say we’re at a soft 30% for that.

Should be able to get back home to Colorado by Monday, and likely get a couple day reset ahead of the next system that may come into play later next week.  But that’s so far in lala land that I am not even going to attempt to make sense of that crystal ball reading yet.  It’s April, it’s prime time now, so don’t expect a nothing burger out of the month.

That all said, I am going to finish my home obligations, then finish loading up and head down to grab Ed in Denver; we’ll pull the trigger on our routing out and off we’ll go.  A fun note, Ed and I first chased together back in 2007, so this marks 20 seasons of our shenanigans.  So that’s pretty cool 🙂  This will be the first time in 2026 we’ll get out together.