After their first day chase across Kansas and finding a safe spot on a dirt road, David Call's geography class found what they hoped to find througout the summer: a tornado.
Call, an associate professor at Ball State University, led his class of storm chasers to the Colorado-Kansas state line to witness a tornado develop on their first day in the field on Tuesday.
The chances of seeing a tornado on the first day out on the field is less than 10 percent, Call said.
"The rule of thumb is a good chaser in the Great Plains will probably see about one tornado out of every 10 chase days," he said. "Some days are better in terms of prospect tornados."
Call said the storm leading up to the tornado was better than most of the storms last year's group experienced.
"Last year the weather pattern was very poor for storms," he said. "This year we feel more confident and we have a decent shot at seeing another tornado."
Junior John Rarick said it was an exciting opportunity that he wouldn't have been able to experience in the classroom.
"In the classroom you have to identify parts of a storm structure, but that's just a picture in a textbook," he said. "No picture can compare. It was an amazing experience to see the whole thing as it evolved."
The group of 12 picked a storm they thought would most likely produce a tornado, Call said. After 150 miles of traveling around Kansas, they saw the storm drop a tornado.
"I'm proud of how the students worked together," he said. "I help with things, but they did a lot of the work with the forecasting and planning. They did the things we needed to cover the distance and see the tornado."
Call said some of the final decisions come down to luck, but a lot of it has to deal with how well the students work together.
Rarick said it's impossible to predict if they'll see more tornados based on their one sighting.
"We pretty much have no idea what will happen weeks from now," he said. "It comes down to the people involved, not just the climate model at the time."
Rarick said either way, the chase has been interesting and he's excited to see as many types of weather as possible.
"It's definitely been exciting," he said. "I've always been interested in severe weather. This was too good of an opportunity to pass up."
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