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.