2010 Chase Season Wrap-Up

Discounting the rouge fall season chase, I am officially drawing a close to the 2010 chase season.  Undoubtedly this has been one of the best seasons of many chasers' lifetimes, and I am willing to put a bet on the fact that it will end up being one of my best as well.  I am not basing my success on numbers because that would me plain out foolish.  Instead, I am basing it off of how much I have learned throughout the season, how I rebounded from my mistakes, and how much this showed up in my late season chases.

To put it all into perspective, I went from a completely confused chaser with zero experience to a chaser who has now experienced every type of tornado/supercell out there.  I want to highlight the fact that I recognize I am not an experienced chaser by any means and can take only a marginal amount of responsibility for this experience.

At the start of the season, I admit that I had not a clue about what I was stepping into.  This became evident quickly as I nearly wrecked my car in an early season hail storm on April 21.

Realizing that I was by no means being responsible by chasing by myself, I tried chasing with other more experienced people.  Turns out this worked for my advantage as I bagged my first tornadoes with Zach Young on May 23.  However, wanting to put myself in a position where I was forced to act on my own accord, I switched back to solo chasing for the first weeks of June.  During this time I witnessed multiple tornadoes, including the June 10 Palmer Divide day that I will never forget.  Although these were some of the last days of the season that I chased solo, I am now able to recognize how to act and react towards storms when I'm in the field with other chasers.

Just for giggles, I'll throw out some stats from the season.

Tornadoes observed: 46
Tornadoes with other chasers (not Roger Hill): 15
Chase miles: 14000 accounted for, most likely more
States chased in: Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Iowa
Significant tornadoes seen:  1 EF4, 3 EF3
Various car repairs: 3 blown tires, hail repair insurance claim

As you can tell, this is going to be a nearly impossible season to top with the 46 tornadoes observed, most of those coming from the Dupree, SD and Southern Minnesota chase days.  You can see most of my quality pictures in the previous post.  I will be adding more shortly, along with my own "Upslope Chaos" design.

Thanks to everybody who has supported me and helped me grow through this past season, namely my parents, Zach Young,  Mark Farnik, Dann Cianca, and everybody else who reads my blog.