3/21/22 | Elgin, TX

One of the most rewarding things in meteorology to me is a well-rounded, well designed weather forecast. It’s relatively rare that a forecast starts in the long range, works through the medium range, and can be guided to the short range. It’s even more rare that a forecast starts with the idea of a severe weather event and ends up with the meteorologist standing in front of a tornado. Sometimes (rarely, it personally seems) we get it right.

It was the start of a new year, a fresh chasing season. It was the first time back out with friends, forecasters and scientists after two years of pandemic-plus-everything-else. And it was a beautiful Spring day – a full day of forecasting and chasing. Pretty much everything about this day felt right from the start.

Targeting this tornado was fairly simple – we knew where we wanted to be. The setup was classic, albeit in a not-so-classic area. A dryline, perfectly timed forcing, and plenty of moisture and instability. One of the main concerns was whether or not storms would be discrete upon initiation. Wind profiles and shear vectors were just slightly off and could allow for a messy storm mode initially – straight hodographs suggested left splits and hail as the primary threat. The low level jet was veered off to the east ever so slightly. So, if storms initiated – could they survive and not form into a blobby mess?

Indeed they did. Storms developed off the dryline during the mid afternoon, as expected. They were messy initially, and left splits did, in fact lead to quite a bit of storm mergers. But as storms progressed eastward into better oriented shear and a more robust low level jet, they separated themselves and became discrete. At that point, ample instability and a ton of 3CAPE went to work. Several supercells produced a barrage of tornadoes.

We made a few incorrect decisions – including getting impatient and driving southward, away from our initial target. This became a comical error as a tornado tracked almost directly over where we were sitting prior to storm initiation. Thereafter, we moved back northward and tracked with a different supercell, confident it would produce in the environment it was tracking into.

It did.

We positioned ourselves well northeast of the storm and watched the tornado for almost 30 minutes – a miracle given the quick storm speeds. The tornado itself was fascinating – with rapid motion and a beautiful evolution. Unfortunately, the storm caused quite a bit of damage in and around the town of Elgin itself. As we tracked northeastward with the storm, we began to lose the solid road network (and cell service) and following along with the storm got even more difficult. We eventually let the storm track away from us, but not before I managed to step into a pile of fire ants.

At the end of the day, as we sat down at Chili’s with a few other chasers (who also had a successful chase day), it hit me. We tracked this system from over two weeks out, targeted it properly, chased it properly, and observed it as well as we could. That doesn’t happen often, and it’s a testament to the team of people that I have the pleasure of working with.

What a great start to the season.