Arkansas, Texas, and more

Looking for a way to coordinate a weather event with a nature photo event, I had my eyes on the Storm Prediction Center projections. I noticed a developing “situation” with the weather, which seemed to have the potential for a historic tornado outbreak.

Now, my fascination with storms goes back to my childhood, although now my interest is as much the quest for dynamic nature scenes as anything. It’s not that I want to catch a tornado as much as I would like to be close enough to capture the majesty of the supercell structure, in an unpopulated area, the towering rotating mesocyclone, the lightning, the wind…all in dramatic light. I do not, however, wish to be in a situation where my car is totaled by softball-sized hail, or where I am sucked into the vortex like the bad Twister movie CGI.

This potential for “weather” coincided with the peak of the wildflower bloom in parts of Texas, and reports were that the bloom was the best in a few years. So I packed up my cameras and took off, as I am inclined to do from time to time. Spoiler alert, there are no tornado photos! The system ended up being a bilateral system with a Dixie Alley component, generally non-photogenic, rain-wrapped, amorphous beasts that are dangerous to chase on the curvy, hilly, tree-lined roads of the south. The northern component was closer to traditional tornado alley, promising more visible photogenic structures and safer chasing. I left Little Rock, ground zero for the southern storms, and headed north. Two hours after I checked out of my hotel in downtown Little Rock, the storms fired up much earlier than expected in that area, dropping a violent EF3 tornado within a mile of my hotel. I could’ve watched it pass from my eighth-floor window!

I wasn’t able to make it to the Iowa/Illinois border before I started losing light. It is probably just as well, as the Iowa storms were just as ugly and dangerous as the Arkansas storms. As the sun set I began heading east into Indiana as the supercells in Illinois merged into a linear storm that was right behind me, moving at 70 mph and threatening spinup QLCS tornadoes in the dark. I checked into my hotel to the sound of tornado sirens. There were 60 tornadoes that day. Here is news clip of the day’s events.

Following are the photographs I did capture along the way…mostly wildflowers…no wild weather.

Wildflowers

Streets & Sights