Storm Chase Update #3

First of all, I promise this is not becoming a storm chase blog. However, since I am no longer out with Walker, I cannot rely on his blog to keep my wife updated on my successes and failures. Plus, I am not driving on this trip, so I have some spare time on the roads in the morning.

So, with that being said, yesterday (May 25) was a great day for us. We left Lexington, NE with an initial target of Springfield, CO. We were quite excited about the way all the variables were coming together, and we were certain that a little "High Plains magic" would treat us to at least a picturesque supercell, and hopefully a tornado.


Storms fired along the state line southeast of Springfield just as we were reaching Johnson City, KS, so we pulled alongside the best-looking storm and witnessed a great wall cloud quickly form. It produced a nice funnel, but the photo above was as close as it came to producing a tornado.


Within an hour, the initial storms were looking weak and disorganized, and the only hints of redevelopment were on the western sides of the three cells. So, we hopped over into Colorado and started north on a road near the border. Our initial storm eventually started to reintensify as evidenced by the hail streak above. Note, we are looking toward the NNE, so the updraft base was on the western side of the storm despite a northward motion. Weird.


A few minutes later, the storm to the north showed good rotation on radar. So, we ditched our storm and hurried to the north on a great paved county road. We could not believe our luck when we found this road, because most are gravel (or worse) in this part of the world. When we were about 12 miles away from the storm, it started producing land spouts. Almost as cool as the spouts themselves was the fact that we were essentially alone on this paved county road, except for Dr. Howie Bluestein...the person who coined the term "land spout." We played "leap frog" with him and his driver for nearly an hour. The second of four land spouts is pictured above.

At this point, the third and fourth spouts are on the ground simultaneously.

Then, the tubes wrapped around one another in a cool little dance.

A wide-angle shot of the developing storm and the last two land spouts.

Ok, now the storm was mature and had a nice, rotating updraft just west of Towner, CO. For ~20 minutes, the wall cloud and inflow tail cloud were dragging the ground. Motion was not strong, and I do not think there was any damage, but the scene was certainly impressive.


Notice the condensed, inflow air being dragged along the ground as it is sucked up into the slowly-rotating wall cloud.


Over the next 40 minutes or so, the storm began rotating more rapidly. This caused the storm to become more classic in appearance. So, the motion changed from NNW to NE and the updraft base drifted around to the south side. This whole process took nearly an hour, but at this point, we are still only ~5 miles east of Towner...this storm was nearly stationary. Ultimately, once it was organized, it produced several almost-to-the-ground funnels and this nice tornado that lasted a couple of minutes.


The storm now started moving forward at about 25 mph, so we blasted east to Tribune, KS and then went about 10 miles north to catch the meso just before it crossed HWY 27. This was where we experienced the only real chaser convergence as everyone was looking for good roads that headed north and east. The storm was spinning very well here, and it produced it's final tornado of the day about 2 miles to our west (above). It started showing signs of turning right, so we continued east on a good gravel road as the rest of the chasers went north looking for either a closer view of the tornado or a better road. Either way, when the storm turned, most of them were cored or stuck behind the storm as we leisurely stayed in front of the meso for the next couple hours.


Despite being done with tornado production, it presented several more photogenic scenes for us, and the moderate storm speed and the lack of other chasers, traffic, and towns made for a very satisfying end to the chase.

This is the last time that the meso wrapped the "hook" completely around itself before becoming rather linear. Lots of hail in there!

We then quickly shot east to try and catch another storm that was supposedly producing a large tornado, but it was dark when we arrived and the circulation was apparently wrapped in rain. Even some long-exposure shots revealed nothing of interest, so we made the short (~20 miles) trip up to WaKeeney, KS ("Christmas City of the High Plains"). A final count of 6 tornadoes made this the most productive chase of the trip.