A Technological Adventure
Perhaps the tornado watches issued were an overkill Monday night, but storm chasers weren’t disappointed with the massive cells that formed ahead of the dryline. We started chasing a little before 3:00 pm Monday afternoon and after 340 miles, we called it a day. Oklahoma dodged a bullet, but Nebraska wasn’t so lucky. There were reports of injuries and structure damage near Lincoln.
Even though none of the storm cells we chased on Monday produced anything more than rain, wind and hail, they signified the beginning of the spring storm season in Oklahoma, and confirmed how tied to technology we are. Server problems and router problems caused us a few hours of concern.
The TulsaWxChaser web site crashed shortly after 5 effectively cutting off communications with all of you for a couple of hours. I worried about that a little. I know that many of you follow the weather via this web site. It’s also the way we let people know where we are at. Without it, a lifeline is lost. I was able to contact the hosting service from the field and the tech said they had to perform emergency maintenance on the server. Thankfully we were only down a couple of hours and hopefully an emergency repair now will improve stability for future chases.
The wireless router is another issue, and our problem. Justin and I will be working over the next week or so to make sure it’s working properly. That problem prevented updating our location on the web site and and it cut us off from the radar feeds that are necessary to find the active storm cells and keep us out of harms way.
The internet connection proved to be challenging, but we did find a great hamburger at Rush’s in Billings. We also discovered a couple of storms worth mentioning.
This storm cell, near Billings, was a classic one.
And we chased this storm into Cowley County Kansas.
Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be working out the technology bugs. But this chase was proof that you really don’t need all of the technology to capture the essence of chasing the weather. All you need is gutsy determination and friends to share the moment with.