Well, its over...

It's been a fun ride, but this is gonna be my last post. For now at least, I may do it again when we go out with SLT in a couple of weeks, but we'll see. Either way, solo chase 2010 is now over. It's been a fun and exciting ride. I've learned a lot about weather as well as a lot about this country. The people out here are so incredibly polite and just plain nice. Life is so relaxed, people just don't seem to get hung up on crap the way we do in the northeast. That said...I miss home. Gonna be nice to get back home to my normal life.

Yesterday was probably the toughest day I've experienced since I've begun storm chasing. The set up was so dynamic. It was local. The chase country was flat and scenic. The only thing missing was storms. Our original target yesterday was a small town called Tecumseh in southeast Nebraska. We arrived in Tecumseh with the expectation that storms were going to explode rapidly. The atmosphere was incredibly unstable, to the point where you could feel it just being outside. It was brutally hot and tangibly humid, the kind of atmosphere where you would expect violent thunderstorms. Well...it just never happened. The cap was too strong. The cap is a layer of warm air a couple of thousand feet above ground level that suppresses condensation, thus not allowing clouds to form. Long story short, we "blue sky busted", as no storms fired in our target area. What an incredible disappointment it was. After waiting around for hours in Tecumseh, we called it a day around 6 pm, when the SPC issued a discussion that all but confirmed our fears that storms would not be occurring, or at least in a form that could produce tornadoes (a line of thunderstorms would go later, but nothing that would be remotely tornadic).

In any event, we went back to Adam's in Lee's Summit for the night, where we are again today. I leave tomorrow on a 645 am CST flight and will be home in the early afternoon.

I would like to extend my great thanks to Adam for making this all happen, as well as his family for graciously having me for the past three days. They have been so very hospitable to me, and I can't be grateful enough.

So the final statistics:

Confirmed tornadoes: 3

Possible tornadoes: 3

Supercells: 4

Largest hail (seen by me): Pea to penny size

Pizza Huts: 18

Well, that's it. Thank you and I hope you enjoyed reading my blog. I'll be sure to do it again next year.