Hello folks,
I'm cross-posting this from my personal blog...
Just to let you know... Beginning this evening, I will be away on vacation until late Monday. My brother-in-law and I will be traveling along with a few co-workers of mine to the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota. We look to do some hiking, camping, and sight-seeing.
Yes, we realize it's going to be in the 30's at night. Call us crazy, but it's something we're all looking forward to...
If, by chance, you need to contact me, I'll have spotty cell coverage, but you can certainly try me there first. As always, the contact information is linked above.
Take care and have a wonderful weekend!
Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts
Cross-post from my Personal Blog
Hello everyone!
Effective later this afternoon, I'll be out of town on vacation. I'm hoping to be on the road and on my way home back to Indiana by 5:00 PM. That would put me in Bluffton by 8:00 or 9:00 AM Friday morning, at the latest.
If there is anything you would need to get a hold of me for, I will have Internet connectivity from home, so I will have access to E-mail. Otherwise, I obviously, will have the cell phone with me, so by all means, feel free to give me a ring any time. My contact information (E-Mail address and phone number) is linked above.
Also, I will have my GPS operational throughout my drive home. If you would like to track where I'm at on my trek through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, feel free to check up on me on my GPS Tracking web-page. My position updates by the minute and the page will update every two minutes. Also, note you can zoom in and out of the map by using the "+" and "-" buttons in the upper left-hand corner of the map and can maneuver around the map by click and dragging the map from left to right, to up and down.
Take care, and some of you I'll see very soon... Others, I'll see you in about a week and a half!
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...)
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)