Hokie Storm Chase 2025

get a little bit closer to this. Beyond that, I'm not entirely sure what our routing options are. Navigators, do we have an east round out of Mayfield? Yeah, we do. We've been chasing storms here through Virginia Tech. The first students actually out back in 1992. So we've been doing this for 30 plus years. The way I describe it to the students, it's a round-trip ticket. We want to be out and back home safely. It was very common for us to start the day meeting up in one of the hotel rooms, all 18 of us, and going over observations and model data to pick the most likely location across the country that a tornado would occur, and for us to be able to finely tune that location and adjust as necessary in going to those locations to have a very successful intercept where we saw the storm develop from the beginning and all the way until the end to see the entire life cycle of the storm. We were able to accomplish that not once but almost probably three or four different times throughout this chase. In Kansas when the storm got a bit bigger a shelf cloud did end up forming. That was a pretty large supercell. What we felt was a really really strong inflow. Enough to where you can kind of lean back into the wind and you can just feel the storm just sucking everything up. We were basically right on the scene of where the storm formed. We were by an airport and we got an amazing view of like the cloud circulation and basically we saw the storm complete from birth. We were spot-on with where we started and then we started chasing it for a little while. I believe it was about 50 miles. At one point there was a tornado that formed however it was very rain wrapped so unfortunately we didn't get a glimpse of it but this is still for our very first storm it being a tornadic storm is still incredible. Observing storms safely does require some experience in recognizing storm structure how the storms evolve and how they're going to move so most people are surprised at how close we can get as we were on this trip close to the storm in relative safety as long as you have a good beat on the storm motion the road network and the way I like to describe this as well is whenever you are not calling the shots in terms of your movement around the storm that's when we pull off. So knowing where you are in the inflow region of the storm, where the best features of the storm are visible, that's typically where we try to locate. We were in southern Oklahoma and we watched a supercell form. You could see a wall cloud start to form, so that's when we knew that the supercell was really going to mature and build into a pretty big thunderstorm. And over time we tracked it for a couple hours until it dissipated near the Texas border. On our Minnesota chase day we began with a target of northwest Minnesota. One supercell in particular formed. We were in a good position to watch the wall cloud pass right over us. On the back side of the storm we were able to see two tornadoes develop which was a surreal experience. When we were in Minnesota we had to decide whether to drive out west to see if we could intercept any more storms or just head back east to go home. We did decide to go out west. We ended up in Colorado. We intercepted a bowing line of storms. There weren't any tornadoes, but we did see a pretty solid shelf cloud, lots of lightning, which was pretty cool. It was an incredible chase. Some of the final stats, we saw three or four really well-defined We traveled over 6,000 miles across 17 different states, one of which was northern Minnesota, 40 miles away from the border, which was the farthest north any Hokie storm chase has ever been. We drove through Kansas and Nebraska where we experienced 105 to 106 degree temperatures, which was also the highest across all of the Hokie storm chases. Wonderful trip, certainly ranks within the top five, potentially even top three overall chases that we've been on and how successful it was. Mission accomplished yet again this year.