Day two...

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!