Weather On This Day: January 7th, 2005:

My first experience with the National American Meteorological Society meeting had been so positive that I decided to go again the following year. Few Florida State meteorology students would be around during the first week of classes anyway.

With my flight plans, registration, and hotel arrangements in place, I arrived at the Tallahassee Regional Airport late on Friday afternoon on January 7th. The weekend before the AMS meeting was for the students, and I planned to take part in those activities again this year.

One of my classmates was waiting for the same flight to Houston when I finished with security. I sat next to the young man who was in fact my future brother-in-law, and we talked about the upcoming conference.

We went our separate ways once on the plane.

I had not thought about which side of the plane that I should sit, so my view to the north would be a lucky choice. At first, I regretted the choice: the southern view would give me an uninterrupted view of the Gulf for the entire flight to Houston. I would see the southern portions of the Gulf states and the skies above them.

The Storm Prediction Center forecast thunderstorms over the southern Mississippi River valley, but the office only expected widely scattered severe storms. The air was not expected to be warm and unstable enough for tornadoes.

The sun did not really set in the west as the flight pushed towards the continual twilight at roughly the same speed as the earth’s rotation at 32 degrees north, somewhere around four hundred MPH.

To the north, a line of thunderstorms appeared on the northwestern horizon as we crossed over the Mobile Bay. They were not as tall as the 60,000-foot thunderstorms my friends and I chased during the summer of 2004, but they still reached 35,000 feet in the atmosphere. Lightning increased as the storms grew closer.

Unknown to me, several of the storms were rotating down at the surface. The air had in fact warmed enough ahead of the strong January storm system, and intense thunderstorms were the result. Various individuals reported several tornadoes over southern and central Mississippi.

I sat in my airline seat, mesmerized by the flashing yellow light atop the gray and purple clouds. Moving to Florida had not cost me the ability to storm chase after all! It was a lot easier to get to the target in a plane than having to drive 60 MPH on stair-stepping roads. Of course, I did not get to sit and watch the lightning for an hour.

The flight moved quickly to the south of the line. After a few minutes, the plane was safely southwest of the trouble, and we began our descent into the George H.W. Bush International Airport in Houston, Texas.