August 19 2009 Rain Wrapped Tornado

Surprisingly, even though it was probably my best tornado intercept in all of 2009, frustrating as it even was I never actually made a legitimate account for the page with video captures and a narrative. So, my project for today was to take care of that. Every day that was deserving of an account from 2009 now has one, here.

The summary with photos, video captures and some radar images can be found here.

We're still stuck in this boring winter pattern that we've been in for the last couple months, so there is nothing to update meteorology wise. I'm more or less ready to go once mother nature decides the battle of the air masses shall begin. I don't care to speculate how early that will be. That said, and this could be the desperation left in my system after a long winter, and even longer 2009 chase season, but I get the feeling that it's going to be like a rubber band snapping once the pattern does revert back to a stormy one. I don't know when that will finally happen, but it makes me bank on an active late March and April in this area. When was the last legit tornado day in April in the midwest? 1996? I can't think of anything after that. I'm pretty sure Iowa has had it's share, but how many chasers did it screw over on those days? I bagged a couple tornadoes in April 2006, but one of those was in Indiana and the other was in central IL, but at about 2:30 in the morning. That's a peculiar enough story in itself, since they were both in the same 24 hour period. Bag a tornado at 2:30 am, go to bed, and then see another tornado in another state that afternoon on the same day. Anyway. Again, it could just be personal emotions following the last year, but once winter starts losing it's grip, I'd expect a fairly "Lion"-esque arrival from spring. Don't take my word though. Just look at my snow totals for the last couple of winter storms to see why listening to me these days isn't advised.