We're getting in late again tonight and after a little fiddling around with the models here tonight, I'm gonna leave a very short, abridged version of the past couple of days...
Thursday, we chased a high risk day in Nebraska... Had several supercells around us and even had a tornado form about 3/4 of a mile to our north southwest of Kearney. Pretty incredible!
Stayed the night in St. Joseph, MO - then chased southeastern Kansas on Friday. That didn't end up all that well, with scattered weak showers developing along the trailing front during the early-evening. No big storms developed until near sundown when the capping inversion finally broke down.
I'll write more tomorrow night or maybe Sunday, when I return home and have more time.
I'm too tired to write much...
More later...
What was initially planned as a relocation day turned into a nice surprise. We left Norman Wednesday morning, shooting for Hays to pick up my car, then to continue on to McCook, NE - where we were going to stay for the night. We expected a chase day for Thursday, so we wanted to find a spot somewhere near the NW-KS/SW-NE border for the best logistics.
We made it to Hays with no problems, and while, we continued monitoring the situation in Colorado through the afternoon. Upslope action looked to be fairly marginal and initially we thought of blowing it off for the McCook destination. While in Hays, however, we decided to shoot for storms that had begun developing off the mountains in eastern and northeastern CO. We made our way westward along I-70, eventually making it near Kit Carson, where we dropped south to observe a rather nice cell there. The storm showed a decent couplet on GrLevel3 in the velocity data, so we busted through the edge of the precip core from the north, to get to the southeast quadrant and made it in time to watch the lowered cloud base to our west move to our north and east. The wall cloud did get its act together somewhat and did exhibit rotation, but it didn't quite drop anything. There were very brief funnel "attempts," but nothing materialized. It seemed that the high LFC's today really hurt our chances at seeing a tornado. And it also didn't seem that the storm, itself, had a very pronounced RFD to help wrap up the low-level mesocyclone.
Either way, we watched the storm move off to our east-northeast into more stable air as it rained itself out.
We're sitting here in Colby, KS tonight and we're getting rather excited about tomorrow's potential. It's looking like it may turn into one of the better setups we've had this week and with a Day 1 outlook that includes a 15% hatched in it's tornado probabilities, it's got both Jared and myself rather anxious for what could be in store. It's looking like central Nebraska, perhaps, far north-central Kansas will be the place to be. Should be fun!
More later...
I apologize I didn't get around to writing anything last evening. We didn't get into Norman until late and we were all tired. Yesterday (Monday), we targeted primarily southwestern Kansas, ironically enough, around the Greensburg area.
We drove into Greensburg to see the rebuilding effort there and ran into a mass convergence of chasers at the local gas station. It wasn't particularly a fun experience with 50 chasers there. But, it was still nice to meet some locals and I was able to purchase a book that some of the locals had put together about their experiences with the EF-5 tornado last spring. I haven't started reading it yet, but it will probably be an interesting read.
Anyhow, we ended up sitting outside of Greensburg, watching developing towers to our south and southwest. By around mid-afternoon, we had storms developing to the southwest and after relocating slightly north of Haviland, a nice Supercell went tornado-warned to the southwest of Greensburg. We tracked this storm eastward towards Pratt, but never did see any tornadic development. The storm certainly tried though. This thing had tremendous inflow from the east and southeast and had a very robust inflow band. It was just incredible. We eventually made it to 160 and we ended up sitting off here at a couple of spots just watching this thing attempting to get it's act together. It never did and other storms developing all around seemed to become outflow-dominate rather quickly. We weren't quite sure why, but it seemed that none of the storms could maintain their inflow/outflow balance all afternoon. We eventually called it an evening after this cell collapsed and moved off to the east toward Kingman. We continued eastward on 160 to 281 to return to 54/400, then progressed eastward towards Wichita. We stopped near Kingman to watch a cell that had become tornado-warned, but it really didn't amount to much either. After that, we continued through Wichita, then making it back to Norman to spend the night.
Today (Tuesday), we took off towards southwest Oklahoma and far northwestern Texas. It seemed pretty much the same story today. We all thought storms would develop along the cold front from near Childress, TX upward through Woodward, OK, with other storms developing near the Cold Front/OFB intersection. With the latter, we were hoping would become the storms of the day. It didn't necessarily turn out that way, as storms again seemed to fire off earlier than expected.
They continued that outflow/inflow imbalance again today, as well, and none of the storms did really look all that impressive. Storms around the Altus area seemed to build into a rather significant Supercell, with several reports of hail coming out of the cell that eventually came together. It went through a transition of mergers before becoming the initial dominate cell. We had decided to drop southward to play storms developing ahead of the cold front, hoping that interaction with the OFB would give them that extra "umph" we needed for tornadic cells. It didn't seem to work, much as the past couple of days have been. We played around with storms in the Chillicothe and Quanah, TX area, across the Red River, but eventually moved back north into Oklahoma to follow storms to near Eldorado, OK. As these storms fizzled, we retreated back south to Quanah, where we actually intercepted a newly formed Supercell north of town. We sat very near and actually, under, an appendage associated with this storm, but never did see much in the way of rotation. Slight, if any, in fact. The problem, we were getting strong northwest outflow from storms to our northeast and this seemed to undercut the storm we were on. Velocity data on GrLevel3 indicated outbound winds through the entire area. It was still cool though to know we were that close to an elevated mesocyclone! Mid-level rotation did exist on the limited radar data we were getting.
After this, we drifted back east through Vernon and eventually took 183 northeast out of Oklaunian. We took this back to 62 East, progressing back towards Lawton. Upon entering Lawton, Gallina had noticed a strange lenticular cloud developing to our south and with the setting sun and the mammatus overhead, we decided to pull over to take some video and photos. We sat in Lawton for about a half-hour doing this, before continuing on our way to Norman. We pulled into town around 11:00 pm and arrived back here to Guyer's place around 11:30 after dropping Massura off at his house and to grab a bite to eat.
Tomorrow, we're planning to use, primarily, as a relocation day and don't foresee any chasing whatsoever. Unless anything drastic changes, we're planning on getting to, at least, Hays to pick up my car and to possibly stay the night. If not, we'll continue through to Cheyenne, WY to setup for chase potential Thursday over the high country of WY and possibly, western SD or northeastern CO. We'll have to see where we end up. Either way, we'll probably end up back in Kansas Thursday evening, so I'll be able to drive it off of the parking lot, finally, then.
I sure hope it'll still be there and that it hasn't been tampered with, whatsoever. I tend to be trusting of people, so let's hope that doesn't change.
More later!
Had a fairly complex forecast this morning and really had several major decisions to make. First, if we wanted to buy into the risk further to our southwest in western Kansas or to take the more synoptically driven area of Minnesota into Wisconsin. Second, what computer model we wanted to take faith in (they were all really telling us three or four different things), and third, logistics, in general.
We had decided to drop my car, so that we could continue with only one vehicle. I didn't have a problem with it, so we needed to decide on our destination before finding out where to leave the car. If we were to go east-northeast, I was going to leave the car in Omaha with some friends of John's. If we were to go west, we were going to leave it in Salina or possibly Hays or Russell, KS.
The west option became the general consensus, and we targeted a Hays-Dodge City-Pratt area and while we got a little bit of a late start, we were still able to observe the blocky wall cloud when the Scott City, KS storm moved northeast into Rush County. We moved to near Bison, KS and observed this cell become outflow-dominate, much as the demise of nearly all the storms today. This did produce a brief gustnado to our south-southwest (about a quarter mile or so) for about 2-3 minutes and was able to get some photos and video of that. All kinds of chaser convergence along Hwy-4, and several of these falsely reported this thing as a tornado, when it obviously wasn't. I swear, some of these folks need to take their Skywarn training again. The YouTube video linked above was from someone actually sitting across the highway from us.
Anyhow, after this, we played around with other convection around southwestern KS, as an OFB from our convection pushed southward towards DDC. Air in this area wasn't worked-over quite yet, so we thought that this may have had the opportunity to fire off some decent Supercells yet. While other storms did develop, they never got their act together and after sitting near Great Bend for about a half-hour, we bagged the evening to retreat to our hotel in Russell. Our room was given away, unfortunately, and much to the displeasure of all of us, we had to relocate to another Super-8 in Hays. It isn't quite so bad, still, as logistics will still be quite simple from here tomorrow. So as far as the models stay consistent with what their progs were indicating earlier today.
A rather aggressive shortwave looks to eject out of Colorado tomorrow, affecting parts of southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma. So, we likely won't need to drive far. Dryline action could also be an option, and if worse comes to worse, upslope off the Colorado high country may also be a play for us.
We'll see things pan out tonight and tomorrow morning on the models and if any residual boundaries from tonight's convection will affect the environment around us.
I'll have photos and video up and available upon my return to GFK, but in the meantime, stay tuned... Six, possibly seven more days of chasing are left on this guy's vacation!
Don't read too much into that exclamation point... ;)
I made it eventually on the road by 7am, like I planned this morning and didn't end up meeting up with Jared, John and Gregg until 4:00pm in Aurora, NE. While we targeted the dryline setting up across eastern Nebraska, things didn't seem to phase correctly today and it seemed that we just didn't have that extra "umph" with surface-based buoyancy or mass convergence to get updrafts to withstand the deep-layer shear we had today. Plenty of towers went up today, but they just couldn't get their act together.
Ironically, the storms of the day were in Oklahoma (where John, Jared, and Gregg were traveling from) and in North and South Dakota (where, obviously, I was traveling from).
To make a long story, short, I only took two photos today with the camera and didn't even take the video camera out. It was that bad.
We're sitting in Omaha for the night and will likely make a decision in the morning to aim for the severe threat over central IA and southeastern MN during the afternoon.
Hopefully, we'll have some better luck.
Hello folks,
I'm cross-posting this from my personal blog...
Beginning early tomorrow morning, I will be out of town tending to my chase vacation with some former colleagues of mine. I plan on being on the road by 7:00am and will be driving southward towards Sioux Falls. From there, we will either target southeastern South Dakota or eastern portions of Nebraska.
My expeditions will continue through through May 31st, with my return coming either during the late evening of the 31st or early on June 1st.
So as long as I have a signal, I'll still be available via cell phone. So, if you need to reach me, just give me a jingle. My number can be found by navigating through the "Contact Me" tab above.
If you are curious as to our whereabouts, you may take a gander at Jared's tracking application at his web-site. As long as he has his GPS and web-cam in operation this page should update every 10 to 15 minutes. Obviously, we can't guarantee this will be operable the entire time we're on the road, but hopefully, we'll be able to update our position sporadically through the week.
Be prepared for photos, as I'm sure I'll have lots to share upon my return...
Have a great week, all!
I noticed this in the Visible satellite imagery a couple of days ago and saved some data. If you look closely at the loop below, you'll see a subtle rotation in the clouds northwest of Sioux Falls, SD:
(click on the image to see a larger version)
When comparing this with the 20z RUC analysis, you can clearly see the meso-low in the 500mb vorticity fields over the same area:
Kind of cool to see the meso-low being picked up in both the 13km RUC data and in the Visible satellite image.
And to one up on the 75° we achieved on the 15th, yesterday we warmed all the way up to a very nice, 83° at the airport.
Here are more official numbers from KGFK:
Site Time Tmp Dpt %RH W/H Wdr Wsp Wgs Cld
----------------------------------------------------
KGFK May 16 1753UTC 80 46 30 NW 14 23 SCT
KGFK May 16 1853UTC 81 44 27 NW 18 31 SCT
KGFK May 16 1953UTC 82 37 20 NNW 23 37 SCT
KGFK May 16 2053UTC 77 38 24 NNE 26 38 SCT
KGFK May 16 2153UTC 76 34 22 N 26 36 FEW
KGFK May 16 2253UTC 74 33 22 N 29 37 FEW
KGFK May 16 2353UTC 71 32 24 72 N 24 34 SCT
We had quite a day today... Reaching not only temperatures above 70° for the first time in 2008, we reached a toasty 75° F!
Here are the official numbers from KGFK:
Site Time Tmp Dpt %RH W/H Wdr Wsp Wgs 6hX 6hN
---------------------------------------------------------
KGFK May 15 1753UTC 70 40 34 74 W 9 16 71 38
KGFK May 15 1853UTC 74 38 27 NW 16 22
KGFK May 15 1953UTC 71 34 26 73 WNW 13
KGFK May 15 2053UTC 70 33 25 72 NW 18 22
KGFK May 15 2153UTC 72 34 25 73 NW 12
KGFK May 15 2253UTC 68 35 29 NNW 13
KGFK May 15 2353UTC 70 35 28 73 N 10 75 68