2015


This year's tour was an interesting one. Heading out, the long range models didn't look great. No big bowling ball lows crashing through the plains, and a lot of murky, rainy days with little or no cap to suppress widespread convection. The plains were flooded, especially Texas and Oklahoma, from enormous amounts of rain from the previous weeks. In the Eastern part of Texas: standing water everywhere, closed paved roads, and swamped mud roads. To the west, the Panhandle was as green and lush as I'd ever seen it.

It was also cold, and there were plenty of times as we were chasing that I'd be freezing in cold outflow in the low 50's.

But, somewhat to my surprise, there was a LOT of shear. As a result, it seemed like every storm we came across spun like crazy, and especially on the early part of the tour, there were some big tornado days when it didn't look very promising.

We spend the entire tour in four states: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, and saw at least one tornado in each. All told, we saw 9 tornadoes including a great large cone / small wedge tornado in Canadian, TX, one of 4 we saw that day.

2015 Chase Logs / Summary

2015 Photo Album:
 2015 Photo Album with captions

Chase Day Pages:

May 22nd, 2015: Beautifully structured supercell near Genoa, CO

May 24th, 2015: Lamar, CO and Hugoton, KS tornadic supercells.

May 26th, 2015: Breckenridge and Brad, TX tornadic supercell.

May 27th, 2015: Canadian, TX cyclical tornadic supercell.

All pictures (C) Richard Hamel 2017.

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