Found! The missing “Part 5” to the tornado chase videos

Several days ago, I posted four videos of a tornado chase I went on a few years back. (For info and links, see A reader asks for reposts of my tornado chase videos.)

That prompted another reader — Peter Wharton, who was in fact the driver of our van during the chase — to ask about an apparently missing “Part 5.”

I poked around online and in my original files from the chase (over 1,000 pix and vids), but could find no Part 5.

My old Blogger blog held a clue as to why. I had posted Part 4 of the chase videos on June 6, 2008; my next blog entry, wasn’t until the 11th, and was titled, “… and then the hard drive went *poof*:” My main hard drive had died!

It wasn’t a tragedy — I had backups and lost no data in the crash. But it took several days to get things restored on a new drive and running again. Apparently, I never got around to finishing “Part 5.”

But, as I said, I still have all the original files; and after some more spelunking over the last couple days, I think I figured out what I’d originally planned for Part 5: Pix and video from later in the day, after sunset, when we on the far side of the still very active tornado-spawning front.

Remember that supercells reach way high — sometimes to 70,000’/21,000m. When we were on the other side of the cells in darkness, we saw a vast wall of clouds, almost horizon to horizon, towering to incredible heights, internally lit with rapid-fire lightning, and accompanied by continual thunder.

I captured what I could in stills and video. Of course, 10 years ago, digital cameras really weren’t great at low-light/short-exposures; and the relatively narrow field of view doesn’t capture the wall-to-wall sweep of the live experience — but you’ll get the idea. 🙂

A sampling of stills: