2 April 2025 — Tennessee — Supercells

Published on April 2, 2025

This was my first active chase day of 2025 and it took me to Dixie Alley. I’ve chased the Mississippi Delta before on a single chase day back in 2016 in Arkansas. This was going to be a longer trip and I really wanted to test myself in the Delta region for multiple days and see if I could latch onto something that didn’t involve blinding hills and forests.

My very large target area for this initial day was from northeast Arkansas to northwest Tennessee. The general idea being to stay ahead of the initial mass of interfering storms forming in central Arkansas and try to catch anything isolated out in the warm sector. I made a pit stop at Mammoth Spring State Park on the Arkansas-Missouri border for a little exercise and some photos.

After that detour, I opted to commit deep into the warm sector and headed for the Missouri Bootheel on the way to Tennessee. I was excited to finally get into the Delta and have wide vistas to work with. But I wasn’t counting on strong southerlies blasting across actively plowed fields. The highway was a visibility nightmare in key spots. I don’t drive in Arizona haboobs and I sure didn’t want to get taken out in the middle of a dumb quarter mile wide stream of farm dust in Missouri. Fortunately I only had to tap my way through three of those. I stopped for a few photos before moving on.

By 19Z, weak convection was starting to spot the warm sector, but nothing worth trying to line up for at that point.

Finally, around 21Z, some tornado-warned contenders were popping up east of the Mississippi in Tennessee. I positioned for one near Alamo, but both options were a mess of interfering updrafts that fell apart as they got closer.

Just a bit down the road I finally caught sight of some, at least legitimate, if not tepid, structure on a withering supercell north of Crockett Mills.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mississippi in Arkansas, things were going nuts. The mess of interfering storms that I was worried about were somehow managing to stay reasonably discrete as they lined up on each other. Reports started dropping of tornadoes and I was kicking myself for going after the warm sector when the strongest storms were apparently doing amazing things and not turning into mush amid all the forcing.

After that, I wound my way through Trenton, Milan and Huntingdon and getting deeper into the treed realms before crusing back south to I-40 and heading westbound to try and catch a pair of inbound supercells. Dixie Interstate Chasing, I figured — this is the way — let’s get that fine experience under my belt. As I headed west into the thickening precip, I realized how confounding it is to have minimal, safe pulloffs with masses of trees while trying to stare down the fuzzy barrel of messy forward flanks. I got antsy wondering if my next offramp would be too risky, so I found a crossover and whipped back east to a previous stop at the 101 Travel Center between Independence and Union Cross.

The vista was ugly, but at least I could see what was moving in. The cell seemed to be losing its punch and turning outflowy, but still had some structure as it lashed out with a fierce lightning barrage.

I followed it back northeast for a bit before finally calling it a day in Arlington. Kind of a frustrating chase day, realizing what went down in Arkansas while I was plodding around on the other side of the river. But it did land a couple supercells with decent enough structure, especially for my first chase in Tennessee.