Chasecation 2016, Days 1-2: Flying out for some High Plains drifting

Usually chasecation starts off with a long drive from the East Coast to the Plains. This year, things went a bit differently. My usual chase partners Mark Ellinwood and James Hyde — also of ustornadoes.com — decided to take the year off like a bunch of weirdos.  I actually was going to do the same myself, but… To use a Markism, WOO STORMS!

My plans came together late. At the start of May I decided I couldn’t miss a year, so I convinced Quincy Vagell — also of ustornadoes.com! — to let me tag along with him. He chases like every day all year, I think.

With a large trough of low pressure moving into the western U.S., I hopped on a flight to Denver early yesterday (May 19). We’re still awaiting the real influence of that trough and the followup mid-level flow that goes along with it, but all signs point to an active period of chasing ahead.

In our downtime, we wandered around Denver, and headed up into the easternmost part of the Rockies yesterday. Today we started off in Kersey, Colorado, looped up into Wyoming and Nebraska, and ended up in Colby, Kansas. It was a marginal risk kind of day before things start to get real tomorrow (hopefully). Knowing we might have to head to at least southern Kansas on Saturday we took a chance near Kimball, Nebraska today. It was mostly an hour of watching some cumulus towers go up to the west before we bailed.

Severe risks begin to ramp up tomorrow, and could become more significant thereafter.  I’ll try to be better about doing these daily blogs, well, daily from now on. It’s tough without Mark here, he used to handle them!

You can follow our travels on Twitter via @islivingston (my account) and @stormchaserQ (Quincy’s account). We’ll probably post at least a few things on the main @ustornadoes account as well!