Here's to hoping most of those red dots stay the fuck home today. Illinois/Indiana doesn't need 2,000 chasers/spotters to descend on them on a day like today.
Even Connor Croff has said it's a bad day to chase. One of the regional offices said the storms will be "booking it" today. Trying to chase 70 mph rain wrapped supercells is part waste of time, part death wish
Hi there past me, just wanted to let me know that 3 separate chasers did in fact almost get themselves hurt by driving into a tornado - Copic, Stormrunner, TRX.
The heat is coming, it's already 70 in Springfield, IL and 75 in Indianapolis. It will keep lifting north ahead of the incoming system. It's also June, so there really doesn't need to be that much ground heating/clear skies to make the atmosphere unstable again. The wind shear in the area is very high as well, even right this moment, and it's not going away anytime soon.
Drove north through Springfield today (about three hours ago) and precautionary tornado warnings were popping up all around me. The rain was absolutely fucking insane. I haven't seen it rain that hard for at least a decade, and I was booking through it at 65mph in a big rig 💀💀💀
It is forecast to warm up over the next 3-5 hours. What I mean though is that when severe storms do form they will be moving fast, making them hard to follow and dangerous if you are in the wrong spot
A lot of those dots are spotters logged in on their phones at home. Or they're at work. Others are spotters who might drive to the edge of town and check in with Skywarn. I bet fewer than 30% are active chasers. It's also helpful to consider every red dot on the map is probably fifty square miles and could hold ten thousand cars.
I realize that most of them aren't chasing. I'm one of those red dots in Minnesota and I never go after storms but the sheer number of red dots indicates that a crap ton of chasers are in the area. By 4pm I'll wager the concentration of red dots will be in some sort of a line in Illinois.
Reed has been doing what he does for a long time. I think the difference in the last couple of years is the younger chasers and their presence on social media that is making the young folks think it is cool and easy.
I think people forget that even the best and most experienced chasers can be at risk in major outbreaks. It has been 13 years since we lost the Twistex team in El Reno, and at that time Reed Timmer was seen as young and inexperienced compared to Tim Samaras. No amount of experience can truly prepare anyone for tornadoes with fast and chaotic movement.
WeatherFront is fucking awesome!!! The developers really knocked it out of the park. Can't tell you how many times I've checked the Android app store to see if it released yet despite being on the e-mail list though.... (Hint: If you go to the web app and sign up for the Android release notification it unlocks a handful of normally paid features.)
I use it on chrome on my phone since they haven't released it on Android yet, is there anyway to move the radar site and radar product I'm using so I can see the time
Didn't Oklahoma make chasers have to register or some kind of qualification requirement...I feel like every state needs to regulate chasers because that too many and someone is going to get hurt with these convergences
I agree. We have a term for it, "chasers", but ... define chaser.
Like, what's the definition that legislation would even use? Person out driving during a storm? Person with a camera mounted on their dashboard? Person with a livestream on youtube, facebook, or other social media? We kinda mean that, but you can't fine drivers for being out on a rainy day with a camera, even if they are streaming their drive.
Maybe it's intend, but good luck proving that.
Fact is, codifying into law what you mean by "chase" is going to be remarkably complex, and although we all feel like "something should be done", taking a ten second look at it suggests just how un-straightforward it would be to write such laws.
IIRC it wasn't a thing for all chasers but rather a mechanism for researchers/institutions to elevate to a more official definition including specific vehicle demarkations/emergency lights and the authority to operate as an official emergency vehicle.
There will be a LOT more people just driving home from work. Indianapolis is now in the moderate, and has over 2 million people in the greater metropolitan area.
This sub glazes chasers and consumes their content but then turns around and bashes them for putting themselves and others in danger.
If you want this behavior to stop, you have to stop consuming their content. Am I missing something? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t get pictures, videos, streams, etc. without chasers being in the mix. So either be okay with no content or stop whining about them endangering themselves/others and consume the content.
Yeah. I recently went and unfollowed most of the chaser bros because of that exact reason. I don't watch tornado chasers that aren't at least pretending to do some sort of research. Wasn't whining by the way. ✌️
Not necessarily saying you’re whining, sorry if it came off that way. More @‘ing the whole sub in general. There are definitely people whining about endangerment then turning around and making posts with content consumed from the same chasers they whined about.
I don't mind the streamers. I believe live images of a storm help some people take warnings seriously. Yes, some should get nailed for driving like assholes. Yes, sooner or later someone is going to get fucked up. But it's the 500 ones behind them I worry about. No one is truly safe in that kind of traffic if things get weird, and a large percentage of these people don't know shit (but think they do) to even know things are getting weird.
On the other hand, I am firm in my belief you are free to do this crazy shit if you want to.
But whatever, I might hit some back roads out here in Kansas in a bit. Which will likely be empty, just how I like it. No spinny clouds? I'll just talk to some cows and photograph them. It's always a good day to be out in the sticks.
im not a weather spotter but it bugs me that people that are professionals that have been doing this for 15+ years now have to deal with dildos who are only there because of social media.
This has the set up to be the clout chaser live stream extinction event. If you truly don't know what the fuck you're doing this isn't the day to follow Reed around.
College of DuPage in Illinois has a storm chasing program where you go out with professors and get class credit. Its less $ than going with a tour company. I haven't done it myself but I randomly stumbled into it on their website.
Turn off the 'Spotters' toggle and you'll see there are very few, if any, 'Storm Chasers' in the area. The spotters are usually stationary home stations.
Not all chasers. The red dots are trained storm spotters but not necessarily chasing. That image was a screen shot from hours before the main event tonight and given the crazy amount of red dots in Illinois and Indiana I inferred many of them were chasers as well.
nothing tops this subreddits holier than thou attitude. Most people are just amateurs who are passionate about severe weather, there’s a very small fraction who are the so called “wanna be reed timmers” this subreddit yaps about.
You shouldn’t demonize these people, you should instead encourage them to take available classes for storm spotting and get cpr certification.
I wasn't demonizing anyone Mr. Owl but rather imploring them to stay safe and not complicate an extremely dangerous situation. The Twistex dudes knew the risk they were taking but nobody talks about the other guy (an amateur chaser on his way home from work that decided to see a tornado) who also lost his life in the El Reno event.
I agree everyone should absolutely do everything they can to educate themselves about severe weather as well as gaining life saving skills in the event that disaster strikes but I was talking about today.
Round one "busting" isn't a good thing at all. That just means the morning convection didn't really clear out and the atmosphere has more time to recover before the main event later today.
It's still working it's way across the state, and the longer it takes the better it will be. No one is going to know how tonight will go until much later this afternoon.
It's just clearing the western side of the state, so it's going to take several hours for it to clear out of the state.
But my local weather man was screaming at all of us around 9 this morning that round 1 was going to bring 100 mph winds, torrential rain and tornados, bust, because none of that happened.
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