Chasecation 2014 Day 12 – Heading Back East

Yesterday was our last actual chase day as we begin the trek back east. We decided to cut the trip short again this year, with the only good threat over the next few days coming from northern Montana, North Dakota and Canada. The drive to the target area from Texas would take just as long as driving home, and the setup wasn’t tantalizing enough for us to commit to all those extra miles.

While we did not end the chasecation with a Texas tornado, we did end up on another amazing looking supercell that had a non-rotating wall cloud at times. All in all, we caught brief glimpses of two tornadoes, the first one being the first tornado from the storm east of Denver on May 21, and the second being a brief rope tornado near Sterling City, TX on May 26. The Denver area tornado was very faint as it hid behind a rain curtain, and we can barely make it out in our pictures of it. The Texas tornado was very brief and was gone before we had a chance to really get a shot of it. We’ll count the tornado/gustnado from earlier in the day on the 26th as a half tornado, since there seems to be mixed feelings as to whether it was one or the other.

A fairly disappointing year in terms of tornadoes, but we were on one or more supercells every day and had no real down days. There was just one or more missing key ingredients to each day that made getting a good tornado a near impossible task this year. We leave the Plains happy with our trip, and with enough storm structure pictures and video to last us a good long while.

This will be the last of the daily chasecation posts this year. I will get a summary post up with a handful of stats sometime in the near future. The tornado threat forecasts will resume next week.