Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars

From a chase perspective, it was a rather lackluster couple days out this last stint; a lot of excitement going in yielded little for me.  Thursday’s setup in northwest Texas went down about exactly as it was forecast, mostly after dark, despite some afternoon storms attempting to go up a couple hours before sunset.  They never really took off til after dark.  I did get into some hail near Memphis, Texas on one of those cells, but with a setup looming the next day, I opted to turn tail and get some miles in, heading to the OKC area for the overnight.  Meanwhile, about an hour after I left, a second round of storms did produce a couple brief tornadoes between Memphis and Wellington, Texas.  The following day was a total bust for me, opting for northeast Kansas with good parameters along a warm front.  This was an easy choice for me as it saved me from the gross terrain that is northeast Oklahoma.  I arrived in plenty of time, even with a stop in Wichita to see some former co-workers and my previous station.  Things got a bit optimistic when SPC jumped on our warm front idea, tossing up a 10% tornado prob in their early afternoon outlook, but it didn’t pan out.  And I mean did NOT pan out at all.  Storms fired along and behind the cold front, which prevented anything from taking off, to the point that I spent about three hours following NON-severe storms.  I barely hit any rain, calling the chase outside Manhatten, Kansas before returning to Salina.  Hindsight showed I should’ve just sucked it up and played northeast Oklahoma, but alas, I had enough faith in the Kansas target to justify the idea.  Sometimes that works, this time it REALLY did NOT.  I drove home yesterday.

The big stories from those two days weren’t what I failed to chase… but the several big, and unfortunately fatal tornadoes; a couple of those instances happening in unexpected places.  None bigger than the incredible tornadoes in southwest Michigan on Friday.  These happening well outside any real significant tornado risk area.  While they were under a general 2% up there, it was going to take the perfect combo of things to even get storms of severity up there, not to mention significant tornado producing ones, and yet, one supercell managed to form, find and root on the warm front, and produce what will likely be an upper EF-3, possibly even EF-4 tornado.  The video out of these tornadoes up there is nothing short of jaw-dropping, particularly the shots taken as the tornado passed over a FROZEN lake, actually ripping the ice from the surface as it leveled homes along the water front.  While this has the headliner of the week, two tornadoes in Oklahoma also took lives.  The Thursday tornado in northern Oklahoma, while in an area outlooked for tornadoes, came as kind of a surprise for the intensity and cyclic nature of the storm; producing multiple tornadoes in Oklahoma up into southern Kansas.  That tornado unfortunately killed a mother and daughter in their car near Fairview.  Another deadly tornado occurred near Tulsa on Friday’s event.  Not a great start to the year in that regard.

I got home early yesterday evening, opting to make the drive back after landing close enough after Friday’s bust to justify not spending two days cooped up in a hotel somewhere ahead of the next system which should kick off a couple chase days starting on Tuesday.  A home reset is always welcome, and it means I am already 90% packed and ready to hit the road should I get the green light tomorrow.  That being said, that’s what I am waiting for, so already being preloaded means I can wait to see what the ultimate decision is and assuming it to be green, off I’ll go.  Preliminary target looks like northern Illinois on Tuesday, with a shift south, maybe into the northeast Arkansas area on Wednesday.  After that system clears out, the severe weather will take some time off, so we’ll get a breather to recover from all this.  A wild start already to 2026.

Arrived safely to Amarillo early yesterday evening where I awaken this morning to find myself no more than a couple hours from my potential targets for the day.  Hi-rez cams continue to indicated supercells initiating later this afternoon with a window of about an hour or two before dark where if a storm can get established and rotate, we could see a couple tornadoes out of it.  Big hail certainly a likelihood out of these storms as well, perhaps up to baseball size.  I have a couple chase-specific errands to run here in town, so I’ll pass an hour or two with that before venturing out to my target.  Initial gut tells me the Childress area, despite a couple CAM runs indicating initiation further to the west along I-27.  We’ll see where the dryline sets up and decide, but I’d lean to be a little south as opposed to north with cells expected to move east/northeast once they get going.  They should lead me toward central Oklahoma where I’ll likely aim to bunk down tonight.

Beyond that, just wrapped some work obligations here this morning, so I am going gather myself together and start to load up and get out of here.  It’s a milk the checkout day for sure, and I got an extended one til noon, so I have an hour before housekeeping starts beating down the door.  From there, we should have a solid handle on where ew need to go and by when we’ll need to be there.

See ya on the road!

The green lit has been given for the first multi-day outing of the season!  Spending a few hours this afternoon readying the gear as this will be my first run with ALL the new gear and setup.  My Illinois chase included the tablet run, but since then, new cameras, a new windshield mount, new tripods, the works.  So taking a little extra time, more so than usual, just to get squared away, particularly with the new windshield mount which has been a long time coming.  Very excited to see how smooth that makes running the dash camera.  The new tripods will also get their first real work in, so I hope the new system I am rolling with is seamless and smooth.  We’ll see.  Unfortunately these early season chases don’t often yield tripod-able moments as the storms are typically hauling, so my hopes for Thursday extend to a slower moving setup and perhaps the opportunity to shoot some lightning, which will be a good break-in for the new tripods.  Cleaned and wiped down the interior, and am getting her ready for an early season extended trip.

This all starting with Thursday, then going into the weekend with Friday remaining the big day of note to this series.  Perhaps we extend into Saturday down across northern Texas, but I’m not overly wild about that at this point.  We’ll get Sunday down before the next system rolls in early next week, which may offer up more potential then.  But we’ll gloss over that for now as the focus lies with what’s directly ahead.  And that’s Thursday and Friday.

The SPC Day 3 (for Thursday), will kick things off for us as we’ll depart tomorrow to get into position, probably targeting our overnight stop somewhere in the Texas Panhandle and we’ll get up to look things over to decide where we’ll target for Thursday.  I like this day for chasing IF we can get a couple storms up before dark.  I think the tornado potential will go up after sunset, but any daytime storms oughta yield some solid views and probably some solid hail as well.  We’ll track these storms north and east as we work our way to Friday’s target…

Which remains up in the air.  The potential for this day has gone back and forth, but seems to be getting two steps more potential for one step less, so I’d say it’s ticking up a bit.  SPC plopped a 30% in for the Day 4, and I would agree with that sentiment.  Friday has a high ceiling, but could be messy; these early March setups don’t like to play like the May setups do as the cold fronts tend to crash in more unless the system slows up a bit.  Regardless, depending on where we bunk down after Thursday, we should be pretty solid to cover anything we want within the risk area, so we’ll keep tabs on everything heading into Friday morning before we make any calls on what and where.  Thursday plays very well into positioning for Friday, so that’s always nice when that happens.

So yeah, the excitement builds as I get ready to hit the road.  Season 30 got underway a couple weeks ago, but this feels like truly the start to the season for me.  And despite the ‘well timed’ spike in gas prices, I’m eager to get wheels up tomorrow!

It’s been a minute since we’ve seen a multi-day stretch of outlooks from SPC.  If you ignore the calendar, you could pretend this is May, but nope, welcome to the first week of March!

I’m prepping here at home today to head out for that multi-day stint.  It should all get started with me on Wednesday, with four days back-to-back, basically in the same area.  Friday, right now as of this posting, looks like the biggest of the four days, which had been Wednesday as it looked a few days ago, but I’d definitely say there’s no question that Friday is the biggest day to watch.  Wednesday, which is concentrated from Dallas up into northwest Arkansas, I am not ruling out a play further north along the warm front toward Missouri/Illinois.  This has that feel of a sleeper day in the secondary target with the warm front and low in play across southeast Missouri into the southern half of Illinois.  We’ll see how that shakes out; but despite those thoughts, I am meh enough about Wednesday where I probably WON’T haul east for that given better setups (albeit conditionally better) exist further west starting Thursday.

Thursday, and particularly Friday, are the two days of my biggest note right now, and probably stand to be the two days I would venture out on if the forecast holds.  Thursday, again rather conditional, could be an interesting day if things come together in a timely manner.  Friday, which is progged as the biggest day, certainly does NOT have outbreak written on it as the difference key ingredients are a bit out of phase from each other, it certainly looks to be the higher end setup of the bunch.  But as the midweek system clears out, we’ll have to see what’s left in its wake and whether things rebound quickly enough to put Thursday in play.  Fortunately, as long Wednesday remains off the table for me, we can ride out a few sets of model runs before pulling the chase trigger, which would likely see us departing midday on Wednesday.

Til then, we watch and wait… an early kickoff to the season, but after this series of systems (which may extend into early next week), things look like they’ll simmer down.  So all eyes set on the first series of severe weather days of 2026.

In the midst of this mass gear update, I’ve found myself kinda living back in old times.  I remember in the early years, many trips to Ace Hardware, particularly the one in Lakewood off Alameda and Union, where I’d go in and buy various pieces to jimmy-rig my chase setup.  This included running to go and get a few screws, bolts, or nuts to finish various mounting rigs or whatever I was working on.  One of my funnier stories back in 2007, somewhere, I had to go in literally got a 7-cent screw.  I needed something for a mount I was customizing.  I would end up getting audited the following year after claiming a loss on my taxes (before I finally ‘hit it big’); in the audit, I was asked specifically about some of the equipment write-offs, and I presented one of the receipts for that 7-cent screw.  The auditor looked it, closed her notebook, and I was dismissed haha

Yesterday, I was back to my old ways; rolling into Ace a couple times yesterday for a couple parts to modify my old Filmtools Gripper camera rig.  About 10 years ago (holy shit, I’m old), I modified the default rig with a quick release plate that matched my Dolica tripod system so I could move cameras between the mount and the tripods with ease.  I’ve had that setup til now, but have always wanted to further modify it with a full tripod head as moving the camera required a two hand approach of releasing the gripper handle and then moving the camera to it’s preferred position.  While a minor issue, it was enough to be a pain as it would require reaching over to the passenger side of the car which wasn’t always the most comfortable (don’t worry, I was stopped).  But because the system wasn’t broken, I just never fixed it.  The other issue was needing an extension of the gripper since adding a full ball head would add several inches of height and thus not fit the camera on the current setup.  Well, when I started making all the swaps, including the new set of tripods, I finally decided to make the upgrade, getting a low profile ball head and finding the extension kit online.  Yesterday, I attached the ball head to the gripper mount and it’s waiting on the extension rod that should arrive HOPEFULLY by Monday, because we may be on the road as early as Tuesday if forecasts come to fruition (another post).

All that said, I spent more than 7-cents at Ace Hardware yesterday, but not by much.  The 3/8″ bolt was the ‘big spend’, but it worked and the rid looks great.  Once the extension arrives, I’ll give it the test run and I SHOULD be able to mount it higher on the windshield, which actually will free up the viewing a bit as the current location for the mount was kinda middle on the windshield; not a HUGE blind spot, but any obstructions are not good, so mounting the suction cup higher (likely up behind the rear-view mirror) will definitely free up some eyeball space in the middle of the windshield.  But alas, looking forward to finally being able to easily adjust the camera with one hand, and have it easily reachable from the driver seat (again, while stopped – I can’t believe I need to re-enforce that every time, but alas).

The irony of all this; last May I bought my Subaru Ascent, a much bigger ride than any previous ride I’ve had minus my mini-vans.  But with the bigger INTERIOR space, I have DOWNSIZED all interior setup quite a bit, and I am eager to get all this done and working as we’re about to head into a busy stretch, it looks.  Again, I’ll touch on all that over the weekend.  Just wanted to yap a bit this morning before I got on with my day as it’s been fun kinda resetting my chase setup a bit.  Kinda takes me back to the early years. 😀