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