Storm chasing photographer Mike Hollingshead spends his days traveling up and down the Midwest in search of America’s biggest and baddest storms.
He’s seen every kind of tornado, supercell, lightning, and thunder storm there is, so when he recently told Business Insider about “one of the wickedest storms” he’s ever chased, we knew it had to be a beast.
In 2009, Hollingshead tracked a supercell storm from Kadoka, South Dakota to Valentine, Nebraska. At first, it didn’t look like much, but a couple of hours into the chase, Hollingshead realized he might be tracking his “favorite storm.” Here's what it looked like:
Wind speeds reached over 100 miles per hour and the storm showered baseball-sized hailstones everywhere. That wasn’t all. Here’s what Hollingshead wrote on his blog, Extreme Instability, at the time:
The lightning being produced by this storm at Kadoka and again at Valentine was unlike anything I've seen, especially the surreal display as it neared Kadoka … As evening progressed, inflow winds [wind rushing in and powering the storm] increased, into an increasingly structured supercell. They would get to a point I'm not sure I've seen before on a storm.
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