Looking back at the 2024 storm chase season

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Meteorologist and Storm Chaser Tony Laubach looks back on a season when he saw 20 tornadoes and drove his half-a-million career chasing mile enroute to a 20,000-mile season.

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00:00copy copy i got another tornado another tornado on the ground from massive twisters to blizzard hailers

00:11to intense lightning 2024 had a little bit of everything my season kicked off in late march

00:17on a short trip to southwest kansas a prequel to what was going to be a very busy april and

00:23it was nebraska and iowa that we kept coming back to day after day of severe storms built up to the

00:29tornado event of the year as we've seen several vortices start to really spin around this thing

00:34april 26th a day that already lives in infamy for tornadoes wrote another chapter in the day's saga

00:40with one of the biggest outbreaks of the year our chase started early in eastern nebraska as we

00:45intercepted not one but two violent tornadoes north of karni this was just the start as we

00:51crossed into iowa where we intercepted this long track tornado north of omaha it spawned this

00:56satellite twister that narrowly missed us as we pursued the larger tornado in total we saw eight

01:02tornadoes on this outbreak day nearly a month later i was back in iowa for another major outbreak

01:07tracking three tornadoes live on the acuweather network south of des moines between the two days

01:12i saw over a dozen tornadoes with another eight tornadoes sprinkled in through the rest of the

01:17season but storm chasing is not all about tornadoes and for me it was a hail of a season now the hail

01:23is getting big now the hell's getting big all right we're coming in i was literally ankle deep

01:27in the second costliest hailstorm in denver's history in late may hail up to tennis ball size

01:32piled up nearly a foot deep in the northeast part of the city i took cover underneath the tree that

01:37gave its life so that my glass may live i kept busy into june chasing close to home as the season wound

01:43down and on june 21st i hit a major mileage milestone and we're there half a million storm

01:52chasing miles it took 22 years two months and two days to hit that mark i look forward to the back

01:59half of the million in the years to come for acuweather i'm meteorologist tony lawback

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