For the 17th year, I headed out to the great plains to chase storms last month. I normally drive out, but this year I lost my regular cat sitter and initially had cancelled the trip. But I was so bummed out about not going this year that I decided to fly out instead. I don’t like storm chasing in a rental car, because you have to be extra careful about staying out of the hail, and also I have a bunch of stuff in my car setup to make chasing easier and safer. But I’m glad I got out.

May 19

I was booked to fly out to Kansas City, but—ironically—severe storms hit the airport and my flight was diverted to Wichita. Fortunately we only had to wait an hour or so before flying back to KC, and it ended up only delaying me by a couple hours. Unfortunately my friend Pamela—who was meeting me at the airport—ended up waiting long time.

May 20

Probably the best storms of the year took place the day before I was able to fly out, and with limited chase possibilities ahead we hit the road to chase a marginal setup in Illinois. Along the way, I thought repeatedly about bailing out because conditions looked marginal, but we ended up getting on a tornado-warned storm northeast of Decatur, Illinois. It was really trying and had some impressive structure but we never saw it put down a tornado. We chased it east into Champaign, and it weakened and we decided to head south. We ended up in Effingham, IL and found the rarest thing in storm chasing—a good dinner. (Click any photo to enlarge)

May 21

There weren’t any strong storms to chase on this day, so we headed from Illinois down to Branson MO and checked out Dolly Parton's Stampede dinner show. It was a fun show.

May 22

Starting in Branson MO, we couldn't make it down to north TX for the storms on this day, so we gambled on an outlier storm setup in OK north of the big show and lost. We went to wait in Chickasha and stumbled ascross the Big Leg Lamp so that was a win. Also experienced some urinal scripture tract in southern MO. Had a nice dinner in Weatherford, OK.

May 23

This was a frustrating day, but that’s part of storm chasing. We started in Weatherford, OK, and got a late start for a number of reasons. That put us too late for the northern CO tornado that everyone else saw. So, I stuck on the southern storm, which was beautiful and had some great structure, and put out 2” hail right where we had been a few minutes before, and then it died. As our storm died another one to the south formed, but being in a rental car I didn’t want to risk punching through the hail core to get to the base. Of course, it too formed an amazing tornado which was all over social media. We went back into Kansas and then tried to get south over and around to it, but with limited road options ended up just watching a little gustnado right before sunset. I’m a multi-time expert at busting in eastern Colorado; we stayed In Colby, KS.

May 24

We started this day in Colby Kansas, and all the models and forecast were showing a massive cluster of storms forming in northern Oklahoma and moving south right over Oklahoma City, so we headed down at first to Enid, OK, and wrestled with hotel options on a holiday weekend (Normally we wait until at 5pm or so to start looking). I took a walk around a dirt road and listened to the birds, and the model forecast (thankfully for OKC) started evolving west, so we ended up hanging out in a park in Kingfisher. Things finally started bubbling a little so we headed west back over towards Thomas and ended up spending some time on a dirt road near Anthon and watched storms bubble up and die. One little storm fired up north and then another one fired north and west of us and finally started getting a bit of traction. So we headed north and saw Scott McPartland’s truck so we u-turned north of Putnam and hung out with Scott and Dave Lewison, Daniel Shaw and Jason Persoff and a few others. It was really fun to see everyone. Sunset was rapidly approaching and then one storm started getting some lightning and intensifying so everyone started blasting west. Not wanting to risk hail on the rental car we stopped near Leedey to shoot some lightning, and the storm got tornado warned, so we moved south to Hammon and west to see what we could see, and then the storm died. I mean completely died. First lost its tornado warning and then severe warning. We headed back to the hotel in Clinton and we both think we saw a sprite out of the top of the remaining severe storm way up to the northeast. So the forecast and models for intense hail storms and tornadoes didn’t verify but that was a very good thing for Oklahoma City and surrounding areas. But if you’re going to bust on a chase it’s great to do it with hundreds of others, and really great to see my fellow NY chasers, who I live right near but only see in random places in front of storms.

May 25

We started this day in Clinton, OK and then worked down to Childress TX waiting for storms to fire. While gassing up, the first storm fired down near Matador, so we headed south and stopped at a picnic area north of Paducah to watch the storm out to the west. It then started growing a bit and getting electrified so we went down to Paducah and over to Matador to meet the chaser hordes. The storm was really confusing but looked to be surging a bit south, so we started dropping south, stopping near Roaring Springs. It looked to be surging south again and got a tornado warning, and not wanting to get in the hail in the chaser convergence conga line, we went through Afton south. This turned out to be a good decision because SIX INCH hail was documented at this location soon afterwards. We got clear of everything and onto a good east-west road at Dickens, TX, and headed a bit west to see what we could see. We ended seeing a crazy outflow boundary from the storm kick up dust in the distance. A new part of the merged storm started heading east with a tornado warning, so we turned around and tracked east alongside it, and we saw it made a pretty strong funnel west of Guthrie. We got really crazy outflow winds here and again not wanting to get hail on the rental car we blasted back west towards Lubbock through some pretty insane cross winds created by the storm outflow. We got in the clear and then the winds from another severe storm up north started kicking up some pretty crazy dust from the fields so we stopped to take a quick look. We made it to Lubbock and while eating BBQ we actually heard hail on the restaurant roof! Fortunately it was only pea sized.

May 26

We started this day in Lubbock, TX, and the highest probability of tornadoes was down south around Midland. But the setup looked messy like the day before, with again a chance for monster hail. So instead, we headed up to around Amarillo and a very marginal northern setup. We gassed up and headed a bit north and west and sat by the side of the road in Channing for a while. Then headed over to New Mexico. We went a bit west of Tucumcari and then, not liking the terrain, we turned around back to town and ended up waiting for a while in a park. I took a walk around and my Merlin bird app told me I was hearing a white-winged dove, so I got that Stevie Nicks song stuck in my head. We were going to start heading a bit east when we spotted a storm visually just south of town and I40. We found a spot and watched it for a while, and then it got a severe warning. It started moving towards us and wanting to stay out of the hail we headed a bit east on I40 and then, when stopping to shoot back west of the vista, we spotted a funnel some distance southwest. The first one dissipated and another formed close by. Since there was only a handful of chasers on this storm I reported the funnel to the weather service. From examining the photos, I think the funnel did reach the ground, but since it was on the gust front of the storm outflow and not on a supercell base, it would be classified as a gustnado. The squall line that had been moving from Sante Fe and the mountains further west was on the move and overtook and merged with our little storm and then it formed a beautiful shelf cloud. We surfed that all the way back to the hotel in Amarillo, leap frogging ahead to get a shot before the cold outflow winds arrived. Once I couldn’t shoot any more and the gust front passed, we sat in the car and watched the lightning. It was a nice way to wrap up our last chase day of this trip.

May 27

On this day we started the sad process of coming out of chase mode, and drove northeast from Amarillo towards the Kansas City airport where we fly out. We randomly passed through Greensburg, Kansas, which was tragically levelled by an EF5 nighttime tornado back in 2007. My friend had never been to the Big Well Museum, which has informative displays on both the town’s history and a lot about the tornado, and so we went. It’s humbling. Heading out of town, we came across a bunch of shipping containers scattered about by the side of the train tracks paralleling the road, and I realized those were from the train that was blown off the tracks this year on May 18th by an EF3 tornado that, thankfully, missed the town itself. I got out to shoot a few photos, and an off-duty deputy sheriff working security for the site during cleanup came over to check me out. He was a very nice guy and said they expect the clean up to take about three months. It’s going to take some powerful machinery to lift those containers out of there. He was also—like me—fascinated by tornadoes. Witnessing the awesome power of nature is what has driven me to come out here for the last 16 years, but we never root for damage or injury. Driving back out we passed a train coming down the same tracks, full of containers. We had some excellent BBQ in Salina KS, and I did laundry and repacked everything in preparation for the flight home.

May 28

On this day, I flew back to NYC, and Pamela flew back to LA.

It was 4007 miles in 10 days, and we were in Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas. We didn't get any tornadoes, but there were only a few during this period, and those were adjacent to giant hail, which we didn't want to risk in the rental car. But overall it was a good trip and it's always great to be out there focusing only on one thing: chasing the wind. I look forward to getting out again next year.

Great Plains Storm Chase 2025