2022 10/13 Morton, TX Tornadoes Megan Dodson & Cort Scholten

Our speaker for the evening was Megan Dodson, a meteorologist from the Northern Indiana National Weather Service office, along with club President Cort Scholten. They presented on the series of tornadoes near Morton, TX earlier this year in May and their experiences chasing them.

Megan then began the talk with an overview of the first few days of the trip, talking about how there wasn’t an exact plan for the trip, but to go wherever the wind led. It wasn’t until the third day of the trip that the tornadoes were seen, but various activities were still found in order to enjoy the trip.

The third day, May 23rd, brought the trip to western Texas. Megan described the area of the Caprock Escarpment and how the elevation change there provides a way for low level moisture to pack up against it and become a focus for thunderstorm development through upslope flow (additional lift). Megan also described the drought conditions that west Texas was experiencing at the time, a D4 drought, which is considered exceptional drought. A quick refresher was given for those in the room on the various ingredients needed in order for thunderstorm development (lift, moisture, instability, and wind shear). This was followed by an analysis of the upper air  conditions shown in the models for the day, as well as the upper air sounding from the balloon launched in Amarillo earlier in the day, to explain why the particular area was chosen to look for storms and hopefully tornadoes.

Megan put together a map of the chase that day, providing photos and videos (with radar imagery explained by Cort) from each location on her map. An unusual aspect of this particular chase was the extreme amount of dust blowing in the air due to the extreme drought. This led to little to no visibility in some cases. Surprisingly, though, the dust all cleared out right as a large, nearly stationary, tornado began to touch down in a field to the north. This being Megan’s first tornado, she took a selfie with the tornado that went viral on Twitter (compared to her usual tweets) and led to media interviews.

Later after leaving the tornado due to wanting to protect the vehicle’s windshield from hail from a separate storm cell merging, additional  tornadoes were witnessed. Three ground swirls were visible in video shown by Megan, along with a power flash. Once that area of rotation got too close, they had to leave the storm. As they were heading to Lubbock for the night, the vehicle got assaulted by a large tumbleweed blowing in the strong storm inflow which dented the windshield frame of the vehicle. Megan then continued the story of the rest of her trip. This included a visit to the San Angelo, TX NWS office, Megan’s first experience with hail larger than 2 inches, the Twister Museum in Wakita, OK, the Big Well in Greensburg, KS, Carhenge in Nebraska, Custer State Park in SD, and Mount Rushmore. The trip concluded with a couple of storm chases in South Dakota and Nebraska before heading back home to Indiana.

The slide show below shows some of the elements discussed above as well as the videos and the corresponding slide number presented during the talk.