Days Three and Four

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!