The first real chase of 2008 up here in the Northern Plains is now in the books...
Our initial target area west of Bismarck turned out to be a good one. We departed Grand Forks around 11:30am and arrived in Bismarck near 3:00pm - exactly the 3.5 hour drive we expected. We spent a half-hour, maybe 45-minutes to top off the gas tank and grabbed a bite to eat at a local Schlotsky's Deli, then continued west to Glen Ullin. We turned north on SR-49 and sat off here about 2 miles north of I-94. We found a great vantage point to view west on top of a hill and observed two separate cells slowly move eastward toward us. The storms had already initiated over far southwestern ND and seemed to be maturing when we arrived at this location.
We had one cell to our west-southwest with the other west-northwest of us - probably between 30 to 40 miles. Both storms were exhibiting subtle lowerings in them and had a lot of scud underneath them. Each cell cycled through a couple of attempts at wall clouds before finally organizing into two very nice looking walls. Another cell to our north-northeast had also begun to develop by this time and, on radar, was also indicating weak rotation in the SRM product on GRLevel3.
The radar imagery was quite impressive as we had three distinct areas of rotation on radar all within a 30 mile radius of us. Granted the storms were far enough west of the radar that the rotation wasn't all that close to the cloud-bases. And that was likely the reason we hadn't heard any tornado warnings out for them. Visually, these things were quite beautiful to look at.
It was a general consensus today that these storms very likely didn't produce because of the lack of low-level flow. When we stopped north of Glen Ullin, we did not have any surface winds. It wasn't completely calm, but it may as well as been. Additionally, they were out of the south and not the southeast; what I had been hoping for.
Either way, after sitting in this location for about an hour and a half, we decided to get back on I-94, to head back East to get back out ahead of the storms and to possibly get in better position to intercept the storm to our northeast. This storm took off and was looking pretty meaty on GRLevel3. We made it East to near Sterling, then went north on SR-14 about a mile to pull off into a field entrance. We sat here to observe things for a while. Additional storms started developing along the pre-frontal trough, pretty much overhead and began to outrun us to the east-northeast. We tried to catch back up with this stuff by continuing north on 14 to Wing to meet up with SR-36. On our East turn here and progressing, we pretty much decided to bag the rest of the evening to head back to the "Forks." Our storms had merged with on-going convection to the north and seemed to be entering that MCS-o-genesis phase. We followed SR-36 east to US-281 near Pingree, then took this north to SR-57, where we cut across to Devils Lake. Here, we met up with US-2 to continue eastward to Grand Forks.
Lawson and Ahsenmacher played Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo-DS while Shaw and I chatted away and laughed how serious they were getting into their game. ;)
We arrived back in town around 11:55pm and after dropping Ahsenmacher, Lawson, and Shaw off at their cars at the office, I made my way back home.
Even with all the driving, I think it was well worth chasing that far west yesterday afternoon. It isn't often we can get a group of us together for chasing, so we took advantage of it. On top of that, it turned out to be a quite successful day for us. I feel we pretty much saw the best we could have today, without driving any further south. We had two very nice storms with nice wall clouds and did see hail in the form of "hail-shafts." Luckily, we were able to avoid being any part of one.
The GPS setup got a pretty good test run, as well today. It seems the Position Tracking turned out fairly well. It seems there are a couple of fixes to make but I've done these already, so hopefully in future chases, it will work better for everyone. The GRLevel3 application seems to have been a wise investment, as well. It turned invaluable when we were on the road and when observing storms near Glen Ullin.
I have a feeling I'm going to get spoiled with this data and GPS setup...
I'll have photos up at some point this weekend...
Total Mileage: 642.9 miles
Time elapsed: 11 hours 28 minutes
Photo Gallery: http://photos.mhartman-wx.com/
Well, as written previously, today (Thursday) looks to be a fairly active severe weather day across the Northern Plains. As such, a few co-workers and I will be out chasing this afternoon and into this evening.
We are initially targeting somewhere west, perhaps southwest, of Bismarck. We plan on departing GFK by 11:00am to make it out there by 3:00 or 4:00pm.
I'll have data available and as such, will be able to sync the GPS with a new tracking function on the web-site. If anyone out there is curious and wants to track where we are, you can now get it on my web-site:
http://www.mhartman-wx.com/mwx_gps.html
Enjoy the new function and if you see any glitches, please let me know!
Wish us luck!
Looks like this week may be the first real opportunity to get out chasing across the state. Tomorrow could be active across the western part of the state with Thursday looking like another active severe weather day.
I'll be monitoring things closely tonight and may decide to head out west tomorrow to check things out. Depends on dynamite of a setup it turns into overnight tonight on the models and how much sleep I want tomorrow. Otherwise, I may just wait it out until Thursday's event.
Stay tuned...
Nice roll cloud sitting over western parts of Kansas City this morning:
I happened to be stepping through WeatherCams this morning and found this. Pretty cool, considering I haven't seen one of these things in quite some time.
Wow, what a squall line over the mid-section of the country tonight!
Especially interesting with this thing is that while the squall line itself is propagating east-southeastward, the stratiform rain behind is training northeast along the frontal boundary.
Lots of places are going to see flooding concerns continuing through a good portion of tonight and into Monday.
Good evening everyone...
Thought I would share some news with everyone. I've been working on the web-site the past couple of nights and can officially announce that I am now offering semi-live radar feeds on my site.
The radar feed comes from GRLevel3, a radar visualization application currently running on my laptop from home. While the radar will not always be current, it will update every six minutes when I have the application running. Please note, also, that it will not always be centered at a set location. Radar sites will likely change fairly frequently, giving you an idea of areas where I may be monitoring weather features. This will generally be where severe weather will be occurring. As such, I'm referring to it as a Radar Imagery Floater. Featured among the radar imagery will be Base Reflectivity and Storm-Relative Velocity on a half-degree volume scan, as well as VIL (Vertically Integrated Liquid) data.
In addition, information regarding storm attributes, storm-tracks, storm reports, chaser/spotter locations, and surface observations will occasionally show up on the radar images.
I have also uploaded over 100 new photos to my Photo Gallery. These include pictures from a bowing segment from July 22, 2007 here in Grand Forks, ND, photos from Northwood, ND when Justin, Mike and I stopped through on our way back from the Northern Plains Convective Workshop in early April, and all my photos from my Chase Vacation that extended from May 24th through June 1st.
Enjoy looking through the photos and if you have any questions regarding the new radar imagery or photos, please feel free to shoot me an E-mail.
Sorry, this is coming so much after the fact...
We woke in Independence, Kansas Saturday morning thinking we wouldn't have much traveling to do. I had decided to park my car at Ed Robert's place in KC the night before, so in doing that, I pretty much committed myself to chasing on Saturday.
We chased north-central and north-eastern Oklahoma Saturday and it pretty much turned out similar to Friday. Storms along the trailing boundary didn't quite develop, as planned during the afternoon, but did finally pop near the OK/KS border near Osage County, where the outflow boundary had intersected the frontal boundary. We decided to play that and took off east-northeast towards the storms. The NWS quickly went SVR on the storms and while stopped for gas near Tonkawa, a TOR came out for the eastern storm that had developed. We busted east on US-60, trying to catch up, but never did quite reach it. The western storm also went tornadic and when we caught up with that, we had to drop south on OK-18 so that we wouldn't drive into the precip core. This took us in and out of hills, trees, and curves. This part of northeastern Oklahoma will certainly go down as one of them spots never to return to chase, that's for sure. Horrible chase territory!
Anyhow, we still were able to observe the storms from afar and while we never did see any tornadoes from these storms, we did see a few wall clouds and a nice mothership look to the eastern storm for a short time.
We followed the storms eastward and at Skiatook (or what Jared liked to refer to as "Skankytown"), we took 75 north, effectively bagging the rest of the evening for our return to Kansas City. Along the way, we were treated to quite a lightning show from the storms to our north and east. We pulled off for a short time to get some photos, but other than that, it turned into a long drive back north.
I picked up my car at Ed's around 1:00am and we pulled into our hotel in Merriam, KS by 2:00.
I awoke with the guys a little late, but anticipating leaving when they did Sunday morning. We all got on the road around 9:00am. Jared, Gregg, and John planned on playing the Nebraska panhandle, if they could make it out there in time and I made my way back up I-29 through Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and into Grand Forks.
I pulled onto 32nd Avenue right at 7:01pm, so my drive was almost exactly the 10-hour drive I had expected. I noted 9:15am as my departure from KC Sunday morning.
I unpacked the luggage, put things away, and went for dinner. All I had eaten all day was two packs of SweetTarts and a Tropicana Twister to drink. ;)
The trip, in all, was a blast and I'm anxious to go again next year.
Here are a few notable stats of my own, if you're curious...
Total mileage: 2,649 miles
Total gas used: 110.049
Avg. Miles/Gal: 24.071 (not bad!)
Tornadoes: 2 (the first is highly debatable)
Reports: 1 (TOR - 8 S of Elm Creek, KS)
No. of Photos: 293 (will be forthcoming...)