I never thought my first tornado would be in Wyoming...

Finally! V2 intercepted a tornado!!! more on that later, a lot has happened since my last post.

Yesterday, the fleet moved from Colby, KS into Colorado to intercept some supercells that might form on the Rockies and move east over the front range. Initation began along the Laramie range in Wyoming, so we drove north to meet it. The first target was a small supercell to the east of Cheyenne, WY. The storm had some nice lowerings and a few of our probes reported a landspout tornado, though this was unverified and we're all a little skeptical on that one. While doing our transects we did run into a dirt road full of cows (none of them flying, sorry dad).

cows in the middle of the road

That storm soon died out, but another one formed to our Northwest, above Cheyenne. We quickly moved west on I-80 to intercept it. As we approaced Cheyene, the radar indicated rotation at low levels in the storm and a lowering in the cloud base was visible from miles away. I was honestly scared for Cheyene at the time, in that any tornado would blow through the downtown area. We followed P1 into the "bearcage" - the area inside the hookecho where rotation exists in the storm a!nd a tornado would form. However we were in downtown Cheyenne, so we realized any intercept would be really messy. We pulled out of Cheyenne back east on I-80 and hit massive amounts of hail. At times it looked like winter with over an inch of pea sized hail all over the roadways.

hail on I-80

That night we headed back south to colorado to position for new storms today. Overall we travelled nearly 500 miles in over 4 states yesterday. On the ride back to Sterling ,CO we saw an excellent display of lightning and clouds in the storm that was now dying.

This morning we left Sterling to go north again into wyoming. Today was a 10% tornado risk day with a tornado watch over wyoming and the nebraska panhandle. After some time in nebraska waiting for storms to go up, we finally got a target to our northwest in Wyoming. The storm was visually stunning as we approaced it with a beautiful wall cloud that looked like it would drop a tornado any second. We got up right under the rapidly rotating wall cloud and watched curtins of rain descend and rotate less than a mile away from us. Our instructions were to drive through a canyon below the wall cloud, but we made an executive descison not to follow them because we had no visibility on the storm. It was a good decision because our new route gave us a perfect view of a forming tornado that moved right down the road we were supposed to be on!


if you look hard, you can see the tornado (my camera has bad resolution, it looked better than this)

First, a funnel cloud dropped out of the base reaching half way to the ground with some visible debris on the ground, A TORNADO! this first weak tornado died quickly. It wasn't long before our probe got lost in hail and had no view of the rotating wall cloud. (this sounds unsafe, but we were on teh back side of the storm so not in harms way). When we turned around after our transect, we encountered some golf ball sized hail. While i was driving i noticed a dark spot in the rain/hail curtain in front of us. After driving a little further i soon realized i was looking at a fully formed cone-shaped tornado about a mile ahead of us. The tornado at this point was possibly a quarter mile wide. At this point we had good viewing of the tornado for several minutes but encountered steadily bigger hail getting thrown out of the updraft. We were forced to slow down and eventually stop when our windshield took on heavy cracks all over as we got slammed by baseball sized hail.

notice the hail bouncing in the grass, and our windshield

we actually took bigger hail than this, but i didnt feel safe getting out of the car in that stuff.


We came upon probe 1, which was stopped at the side of the road with a much uglier windsheild than ours and lots of their instruments pulverized. We stayed with them and got out of our car to observe the tornado "roping out" - or thinning and bending as it dissipated. We then followed probe 1 behind the storm to watch it for further development, however, we couldnt go in because both our windshields clearly couldnt take any more hail. At one stopping point, we realized we were parked infront of an underground nuclear warhead silo (Wyoming and nebraska are where the US government keeps their nukes). We were soon visited by some military security in a pick up truck asking us to leave the premises immeadiately!


After taking a few more pictures of the storm, we took probes 1 and 3 back to cheyene where we are now to await replacement windshields tomorrow. The rest of the armada followed the storm east into nebraska where it produced another tornado after dark (so the weather channel tells me from my hotel room in Cheyene).

This was probe 1 after the intercept, we took similar damage in
probe 3.

All in all it was an amazing day. The tornado was on the ground near La Grange, WY for over 24 minutes. It moved slowly, allowing V2 to sample it the whole time. It was under mobile radar coverage at all times. The tornado pods took a direct hit from the tornado, as well as the TIV. Sticknets were well positioned and the mesonets had it surrounded. Personally, our misison was a great success in probe 3, as we got all the data we could have asked for in the spot we were supposed to be in. This was the most intensively observed tornadic supercell in history--and somehow I managed to be part of it!

Personally, i couldnt stop smiling all day as this storm was amazing. Being in 3-4 inch hail itself is exciting not to mention when you can see a tornado less than a mile away!!! On the drive back, Kiel commented: "can you believe we get PAID to do this?!" It was a great day, and tomorrow we will try to join up with the rest of the armada as soon as we get a new windshield.

The experiment ends next saturday, and every day between here and there looks like it has the possibility of tornadoes. The first 4 weeks, though slow have prepared us for what looks to be an awesome time!