00:00Tony, you had an incredible chase yesterday. We've been watching the images all morning.
00:04Tell us how you've witnessed, I think, a multitude of tornadoes from a cell last night.
00:10How did you intercept that? How did you keep up with it? We want to hear all about it.
00:17Well, it was certainly a task. As we mentioned, storm chaser, you could probably put an S on that
00:23to go all day because there were hundreds, if not thousands, of storm chasers tracking this one
00:30particular storm. We knew that was going to be one of the issues in this primary target. There were two
00:35targets yesterday, one that crossed southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado, and I was kind of
00:40mixed between the two, but opted to go ahead and take my chances and joined thousands of my best
00:46friends and tracked this, pretty much the headliner of this storm that produced maybe a dozen plus
00:53tornadoes from New Mexico into Texas. The video of this, just absolutely incredible. You can only
00:58imagine what it was like being there in the moment, and this is a wide-angle shot, folks. We were not,
01:04we were a little closer than this camera might show, but we were in a safe position. Actually,
01:09southwest of this particular tornado, this storm was so strong, it was pulling in dust from miles upon
01:17miles away. It was basically enshrouding the entire storm in dust from a couple of miles away,
01:23so views like this were only obtainable when you were kind of inside that ring of dust within a couple
01:28of miles of this monster tornado. I'm super excited, the meteorologist in me, with all the Doppler radars,
01:35the mobile Doppler radar units that were out there, some of the images that have already been shared of
01:40some of these radar signatures. This is going to be a very, very researched tornado for sure, with,
01:45again, I would say a dozen plus trucks and research crews all on this particular tornado. So a lot of
01:51things probably to come from this. This will probably be an event that not only is going to live on here
01:55from a local's perspective, but certainly in a scientific perspective. But as you mentioned,
02:00there were multiple tornadoes on this cell. As I was making the approach here, even late arriving as
02:05the storm was to produce multiple tornadoes in New Mexico, I actually saw two or three small brief
02:10tornadoes prior to this big one. And then even while watching the big one, I saw a satellite tornado
02:16with that. So I was sitting at about five or six tornadoes by that point. And then the second round
02:21came as we were approaching the Lubbock area. This is where the night got kind of scary. We were making
02:25reports last night on the AccuWeather Network, if you were watching with us, with deep concern for the
02:29city of Lubbock because this storm, while moving slowly, was pretty much making a beeline right for the city
02:34of Lubbock and, of course, was continuing to produce tornado after tornado. Just before I got to town, I'd say within about
02:4010 miles near Rees Center, produced another very large tornado. And again, that one also having a satellite
02:46that I witnessed. But fortunately, the higher powers that be decided we had had enough with the tornadoes. So before
02:53moving into Lubbock, the tornado activity ceased on this storm and actually kind of took a dive to the southeast
02:59as it was approaching me. And I had to drive as far south as I could and actually decided because at this point, dark was
03:06falling. The storm was really, really dangerous with the winds. We had wind gusts over 100 miles per
03:11hour recorded on mesonet sites, hail up to softball size recording, of course, torrential downpours.
03:16None of us want anything to do with that. So I actually came in around the back side of the storm,
03:21drove all the way south to get around it and then came back into Lubbock and immense amounts of street
03:26flooding. Some wind damage reported, but the city spared the worst of that. Certainly that would have been
03:31an absolute devastating experience there for the city had those tornadoes continued as it was moving
03:38into the metro. So that was a huge relief, not only for us as chasers that were tracking that storm,
03:44but certainly for the folks that were living in Lubbock. The bad news, unfortunately, today we're
03:49kind of reloading, doing the same thing again. Similar type setup down this way. Overnight storms last
03:55night, including here in Plainview. I was up till three o'clock as severe storms rolled through here,
03:59bringing near 70 mile per hour winds, actually caused a couple of leaks in the ceiling of the hotel.
04:04But we certainly had a long night last night, but a similar situation. And we'll be tracking those
04:10storms again this afternoon, pretty much in the same areas, under the same setup, but that outflow
04:14boundary from last night's storms kind of sitting in the area with the potential to produce again
04:19numerous tornadoes down here across the south, the Texas Panhandle and the Western Plains. And it'll be
04:24something we'll be tracking again. And hopefully we do not see a repeat of what we saw yesterday. Certainly
04:29in the populated areas, it's the good news out here in the Western High Plains. There's not a lot
04:33out here outside of the towns, but we will be certainly tracking and fearful again that we could
04:39be doing the same thing again today that we saw yesterday. Tony, I have a question for you. You've
04:44been doing this quite a few years now. How rare are days like yesterday where you see multiple tornadoes,
04:50you capture it well-defined on video. How rare are those days in your career?
04:54I wouldn't say they're rare, but they're certainly uncommon. I would estimate maybe one or two times
05:02a year you get a situation where you have a cyclic supercell, one particular storm you track that
05:07produces just a family of tornadoes like this. This would probably be the second time this year,
05:12the other one going back to May 18th, where we saw about half a dozen tornadoes between Scott
05:17City and Grinnell. So twice already this year, but certainly an uncommon thing.
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