Chris' Closing Thoughts

Well folks here we are- at the end of this weird little adventure of ours.  I hope that these blog posts throughout have maintained at least the bare minimum to qualify for a tract of coherence, and I hope that you have been at least somewhat able to follow along with some of the things we've been seeing.  I have honestly never seen anything quite like the weather out here.  For one, just the fact that you can see everything here on the plains is incredible, and when your sights are set on a towering cumulous cloud there's not much else like it.  Now, don't take this the wrong way- I have seen clouds before, and in fact I have even seen fairly large clouds, but these were on a completely different scale, and besides, they had the chance of producing tornadoes, so there is an inherent sort of awe and grandeur produced as well.

(Disclaimer: this was a shelf cloud, not a tornado.  Still pretty)

This course met a lot of my expectations going in, and then just completely blew some of them away.  Get it, blew?  Like a tornado?  Anyways, I was excited to go around the country and see places I've never been before, and we ended up visiting 15 different states.  That's a lot of states, even if you only count the 2 minutes it took us to drive past the sign for Arkansas, honk, and turn around.  I think that I was expecting a whole lot of nothing from a lot of these places, and while that was certainly true in many places, I was taken aback by some of the beauty that the west had to offer.  Nebraska had its sand dunes and sweeping plains, Kansas was green and (for the most part) lively, and even Oklahoma had its own hills and rivers and so on and so on.  There are some landscapes tha tare hard to describe without sounding negative, but there was a lot of beauty in the open spaces we found.  I'm glad to have had the chance to see it, even if we were somewhat the harbingers of severe weather.  

Me, taken aback by nature

I was nervous about my knowledge of the weather side of things going into this training, because I wanted to make sure I really knew what I was doing before going into a chase.  It turns out this was foolish- nobody ever really knows what they're doing, and instead just wing it the entire time.  Of course, you have to have done quite a bit of analysis and work to get to the stage where you can comfortably wing it, but as soon as that point hits it's all up to luck and the tornado gods (was that Zeus?  Would make sense).  I learned a ton during our chases this trip.  I bore witness to crippling indecision, only for somebody to yell "GO SOUTH" and have the entire situation resolved.  A decision made is better than none, even when that decision nets you a fading supercell in Northeast Oklahoma.  I learned how to accurately plot favorable storm regions using weather models, and I also learned how to basically stick my head out the window and guess where the rotation was.  Chasing was an intricate dance between prediction and reality, between large scale verification and small scale observations, so on and so forth.  

I'm incredibly glad to have had the opportunity to attend SWIFT.  We've told jokes, yelled at each other, and faced the horror of traffic jams filled with nothing but storm chasers.  We drove through 15 states, almost 8000 miles, and somehow I still never got to tell my donkey in the desert joke.  Ah well, next time.  I'm thankful for the group, for the conditions that kept all of us safe, and my thoughts go out to those affected by some of the storms that we've kept tabs on these past couple weeks.  Nature is honestly a pretty wild thing.  This trip may be living proof that we can try to understand it as much as we can, but we'll never really be able to control it.  Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Yours,

Chris Brakey