I don’t want to turn this into a debate. That’s obviously what happened.
I do want to mention that storms like these nearly always move West to East, and most often move South-west to North-east.
It would seem to me that a seasoned storm chaser would realize setting up North-east of an active storm, was about the worst thing you could possibly do.
The focus right now should be the loss of the storm-chasers, and I’m very sorry to hear about these deaths.
“It would seem to me that a seasoned storm chaser would realize setting up North-east of an active storm, was about the worst thing you could possibly do.”
Very true if your objective is stay out of the tornado’s way. But, these guys are trying to stay in front of the thing so that they can drop their probes in the expected path.
Looks like in this case that they were roughly paralleling it west-to-east when the darn thing made a hard left turn right into them and they couldn’t react fast enough.
I think these guys were chasing the storm parallel to its west-east track. And when the tornado started tracking to the northeast, they tried to outrun it before it crossed the highway and got hit head on.
They were probably caught up in the excitement of being able to get great footage while it was tracking to the east and didn’t think ahead about what would happen if it started tracking in a more normal direction.
“It would seem to me that a seasoned storm chaser would realize setting up North-east of an active storm, was about the worst thing you could possibly do.”
Amen! This was my immediate thought as soon as I saw the track. Basic Storm Tracking 101! Actually remedial storm tracking.