Italian Weather Channel Filming Our Storms

Snow plows pushing mounds of hail around Denver, immense storm cells twisting in the skies, half inch hail and 74 mph winds just a day ago north of Lamar…it must be spring on the High Plains.

Several days of back-to-back rain become noticeable when there hasn’t been a drop for weeks on end.  We take notice and it becomes the topic of conversation at the local coffee shop, but people from around the world take note of our weather and climate as well.

A storm chasing team from Italy has been in the region, traveling south from Denver to Amarillo, and made Lamar their overnight stay this past Thursday, May 22.  Several of their vehicles were outfitted with protected instrumentation on the roof of their SUV’s.  We noticed them at a local motel on North Main Street as we drove by and noticed them packing Friday morning and stopped for a chat not knowing their origins.

As we have our 24 hour Weather Channel, so does Italy, and some of their crew will travel to this section of tornado alley to study our climate and intense weather conditions.  “We rarely have weather like this in Italy because of the configuration of the land and the mountains,” we were told by team member Andrea Clamps, who has been organizing these trips since 2004.  Members of the crew will spend two weeks in the mid west, half at their own expense and the other half paid by their channel.  The license plates for some of their vehicles read like a travel guide with Connecticut, Texas, Ontario and Louisiana giving an indication of where they started from in this country for their journey through the midwest.

You can go to the Italian weather website at http://www.3bmeteo.com/tornadotour and get a taste of how our weather is viewed from across the Atlantic Ocean.

By Russ Baldwin