Kobi, this might make me sound like a complete dork VS your average dork for asking this question but,

What made you spew coffee all over the place from that quote?

 

That's funny! But, he would have a "I'd hit it!" in there.

 

LMAO @ Kobi... ROFL!

 

I had started at Western Illinois University -- was planning on transferring to either Penn State or St. Louis Univ.

To work into the Severe Center in Norman, you're looking at Master's at an absolute minimum with the majority of your 'collegeues' holding Doctorates from either one of the two aforementioned 'big' colleges in some type of meteorological science.

The guys in Norman are the best of the best of the best and the competition to get in there is fierce.

Get a meteorology degree and they'll be happy to put you in an observation station in Bismark, ND in January... it's working back into an environment where you'd like to work that's tough to do within the NWS. Further, the GS payscale really isn't a huge chunk of cake either... Gas for a V8 isn't cheap.

 

I've been an amateur storm chaser for about 8 years now, and I have only managed to see a total of 10 tornadoes so far, but this year is a great one. I've watched numerous supercells form with terrific wall clouds, but for whatever reason, most of the time they don't drop to the ground. (That's really a good thing, but if it's going to drop one, I want to see it.)

That outbreak and the end of March was a fantastic night for storms along the Colorado / Kansas border. We got to see 3 tornadoes all within a 30 mile radius from Goodland Kansas. The only bad thing was that they started dropping at dusk and getting good still shots of them was nearly impossible. We ended up directly underneath a funnel that was coming down, and by the time we got far enough away to safely stop and film the thing, a wall of hail engulfed us and we had to take cover under an overpass.

We turned around, and proceeded to chase another funnel about 5 miles east of the one we had just missed, and had just enough sun light to snap this photo. It's not great, but man did it turn into a monster F3 and stayed on the ground for about 33 miles through nothing but farmland thankfully until it crossed the Nebraska / Kansas border above Bird City and then pulled up.

 

Very cool...

I've never personally witnessed a funnel fall out to the ground... I've seen a few funnel clouds though. I enjoy cloud formations -- mammantus clouds have always been fascinating to me... They're not too common but, I've had the fortunate luck of seeing them at least 10 times.

This is one of my favorite images that I've noted to date...

 

That's a great pic.

I've seen some of those, but not that exaggerated.

I've got some pics of various clouds, but my favorite is this one. We watched two large cells come together one night last year and I snapped this just as the sunlight quit interfering with the camera from where we were sitting. This system on the right had been a beautiful wall cloud, but never dropped a funnel. Still, it was beautiful to sit watch until these merged and basically became a boring rain storm afterwards.

 

It was just the off-handed remark that NM only has 40 people. One of those - had to be there and understand what was going thru my head at the time - kind of things.

Not funny now though.

Nevermind.