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We departed York,
NE pretty early this morning with a target very close to Dodge City, KS
near the dryline. One problem I noticed on both the morning sfc obs
and model data was that the low level wind fields were too southwesterly
across west KS and wouldn't begin backing until midday ahead of an impulse.
Setups can't always be perfect, so we rolled the dice hoping the nose of
the moisture ridge near DDC would help mold some quality storms.
While just outside of Rush center,
an isolated storm initiated near Syracuse very early in the afternoon and
began tracking ENE. Despite firing so early, we didn't have a compelling
reason not to give chase so we shot west of Dighton as this cell's anvil
(shown here) soon filled the view overhead. |
| While approaching
Manning, KS, the previously issued SVR for this cell was quickly upgraded
to a TOR. Given poor contrast, a clear view of the storm's base wasn't
available until we closed to within a mile or so. Here's a murky view of
this supercell's wall cloud from about four miles or so to its ESE.
video grab |
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Another view of this rotating wall cloud. I don't have the GPS file from this part of the chase, but we were on dirt roads for the next 20 minutes keeping ahead of this rotating wall cloud. |
| We eventually made it to a north road before shooting east as the wall cloud loomed to our WNW. |  |
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Tornado! No visible
condensation was noted at any point during this tornado's few minutes of
life. I was surprised to see how much the storm's base had risen in such a short time.
Check out that dirt road...yikes! This was the only east road at the time and at one point we were forced to drive off into the barren field to avoid a large water hazard. |
| After the tornado
dissipated, we let an RFD surge overtake our location with winds estimated
around 50 mph. The supercell later became overrun by garbage storms
west of Utica, so we trekked south and east for the next supercell located
NW of Rush Center.
Here's a view of this new supercell's
large wall cloud somewhere east of La Crosse. This was rotating and
while navigating east we experienced several strong wind shifts immediately
along the RFD gust front. video grab |
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A view looking northwest from near Otis at this supercell and its distant, occluded lowering. |
| Eight miles north of Otis we noticed this new lowering undergo an occlusion. It came close to producing, but the storm was losing its character fast. |  |
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After that supercell withered away, a multicellular line emerged to our west while exhibiting some interesting couplets on the storm relative velocity data. The winds at our location suddenly grew stronger out of the ENE and about 10 minutes after this photo a weak tornado developed to our southwest near Timken. The debris cloud was too small for us to see from our location at the time, but there were plenty of other chasers closer to document the show. |
| This already linear
cell soon became garbage so we decided it was time to book a motel in Hays.
Since we were winding down, I wanted to get some video of this jack pump
as the storm's outflow crashed on through.
We briefly went back into chase mode north of Hoisington and later came across the TTU chasers, but the storms that were in process were very HP and simply looked much better on radar than in person. We called it a night in Hays at the Days Inn and came across the DOW and company while checking in. video grab |
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