Tornado!

So it is currently 3am, and I just got to the hotel a half hour ago, in part because we ended our day 200 miles from our hotel, and in part because a rouge supercell decided to merrily cruise along I-80 right along our return path, with radar indications suggesting "vehicle damaging hail" as the field commander put it. It wasn't all bad though, waiting for the storm to pass gave us an excuse to stop for steak in Ogallala, NE.

The steak of course is to celebrate finally seeing a tornado during VORTEX2! We intercepted a supercell near LaGrange, WY today that produced a rather impressive, long lived torando. Unfortunately, while Heather and I could see the tornado, it was while we were largely driving away from it to position for a balloon launch, so my pictures were taken leaning out the window looking behind us. In the interest of full disclosure, there was a period where we were driving towards the tornado, but we'll save that story for another time. All told we had a solid deployment for a few hours on this supercell, and then once operations ended were able to chase a second supercell (which Heather and I were in great position on from the get go from our last balloon launch) until dark. It didn't produce a tornado, but had a great wall cloud and some fantastic rotation.

Took plenty of pictures, as you may imagine, but can only muster editing one to post tonight because as I said it's 3am, and morning briefing time will be here before I know it! There will be more pictures to come soon, once I actually get a chance to sit down and go through them. Anyway, here's a shot of our tornado, enjoy!