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5-10-10
Chase Mileage: 1,420 miles
What a day. It's pretty crazy that in the day 5 discussion words like "historic outbreak" were used. This was system was pretty hyped up, and for good reason. Parameters were completely off the charts for this setup. Capping appeared like it was going to be an issue EARLY on in the game, but those fears quickly fizzled as models were showing quite a bit of forcing. Forecast soundings were about as perfect as you could possibly dream of. The only thing that I didn't like going into this chase was storm speeds, and they ended up proving to be a bit of a problem.
Joel Wright and I left on Sunday afternoon around 2 and made to Olathe, Kansas for the night. Our hopes were through the roof even before the high risk was issued.
I found this pretty funny. We always joke around about "See Text" outlooks, so a high risk see text gave us plenty to joke about. Obviously a mistake, but still funny.
Hail probability.
Tornado probability. Think they were confident?
After leaving Olathe the following morning, the drive to southern Kansas (Wichita area) was extremely depressing. The cloudy, drizzly skies literally almost put me to sleep. It seemed like it took days to cross over into the warm sector.
PDS watch. This perked me up a bit. It was sort of inevitable one would be issued, but it's always fun to see if for the first time.
After finally punching through to the warm front somewhere around Wellington, it didn't take long for storms to get going. Our thinking was to keep dropping south to intercept the cell that would eventually produce a multi-vortex tornado near Wakita, Oklahoma, but we thought better of it. Our plan was to punch east for quite a ways, then drop south to get ahead of the storm. But seeing as how these things had their afterburners on, I believe we made a very wise decision and opted not to. I didn't feel like driving home without a windshield. We would have had to punch through the forward flank and that is just not good. So, we turned around and decided to get on another very impressive cell that was looking better and better with every scan.
This thing now had a burgundy red core and was gaining an interesting appendage. Our ultimate goal is the tornado, but a VERY close 2nd for me is storm structure. This storm definitely had it. What a BEAUTIFUL sight.
Still heading east as this storm is absolutely racing NE. Look at that rock hard updraft. THAT is what I've been waiting for all winter.
Now on a side road trying to decide what to do. I shot a quick timelapse from about the exact same spot this picture was taken, but with the storm speeds as fast as they were, I didn't have much time to let it sit. I actually zoomed in on an interesting lowering back in there too, but it didn't really show up on vid. There were some rather persistant funnels directly underneath that massive, rain-free updraft base.
I couldn't take enough pictures of this thing.
Somewhat of a lowering tucked up way back in there.
Now it was decision time. That storm was racing off to the NE and we had to do something to stay east of it, otherwise chances were we'd lose it. We shoot north...and north...and even more north. This road seemed to go on forever as this storm was about to cross our path.
This storm was now a beast. This thing had some of the most incredible motions I have ever seen. The picture above, the clouds were screaming left to right. To the right of this, clouds were screaming right to left, trying to wrap up in the middle. Incredible.
Looking back south at the updraft and striations.
There we go, our first real area of interest. It did produce a funnel, and is really evident in the short timelapse I made (vid at the bottom of this page.) At this time there were some baseball being dropped to the right of this picture.
We opt to head further north, but like I said, this road just went on and on and on. We started to get worried that there were no east options as the storm was now passing over our heads. We thought we might lose it. We FINALLY came up to an E/W road and it couldn't have came at a better time. The storm was really starting to wrap up now as we noticed a sudden, rapidly rotating lowering to our due east. As we punched on, the lowering got lower and lower, but no visual ground circulation.
Tornado! One thing that sort of sucked about this deal though was trying to drive and take pics at the same time. First off, I had it set on auto focus and had to shoot "blind" as I kept an eye on the road. Secondly, The majority of the shots were through the windshield as we were getting a little bit of rain. I think it auto focused on some rain drops and really blurred up some of the images. I'd say we were about 1/4 mile away here.
This thing went from a little guy to a big guy very quickly. We're lucky we had great contrast too. The rain curtain (hook) was now forming and starting to wrap around, but not in time to block us from this view. Just awesome. The roar I heard as we briefly got out was quite an experience too.
Roping out. For a bit there I thought this thing had the potential to be a very big guy. It would eventually cycle though and drop again, but out of our view.
Here's what our storm looked like on radar at the time. Very pronounced hook echo with it now.
And velocity scan. As you can see, VERY nice couplet now.
We blasted east in hopes of seeing it again, but the meso was pretty wrapped in rain. Still pretty though.
Very interesting feature in the above pic. The picture was taken at 5:09 and there was a report at 5:06 doing some damage to a barn if I remember correctly. That is one ground hugging wall cloud it appears, but that's all we could see. That was the last we'd see of this storm as we finally decided to blast south to escape the trailing RFD. I love hail and all, but my truck doesn't seem to.
Tornado #2, although it's very far away. When we first sighted it, there was no question there was ground contact, but by the time I got the lens on and Joel got the video ready, it had scooted behind that row of trees and quickly roped out. Normally we'd be halfway excited to see a tornado, but fresh off our contrasted cone, this was just like "eh".
New meso.
This was just
after seeing tornado #3. It was extremely brief and kicked up a pretty
tall dirt plume just over that treeline to the right of the pic. No,
that's not debris in the shot, that's rain on the windshield. Funny
thing is, that area of broad rotation in the shot was the flanking line
cranking into the storm. The meso was well north of us by now. This was
pretty unexpected. If you look at the video, there is clearly rapid
rotation.
Called it a day after storms started to go into linear mode, which was expected. This little treat sent us a farewell present as it was backlit by the sun. I love how you can see the base almost all the way across. This thing actually went on to be severe warned apparently, probably because of hail.
In summary, great day! I can't enough about Kansas. Every time we go, we always walk away happy. We ended up seeing 3 tornadoes and not a single hail stone. Not even a pea. In fact, we even saw very little rain. Quite a bit of miles to cover for one chase, but that's the price you have to pay to play. We also did not have a single bout with chaser convergence. We saw only one other car watching the storm and I believe they were locals. Not a bad day at all! Here is a link to the NWS page on the Kingman/Sedgwick county storm. They used a few of my pics as well. http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=ict&storyid=52245&source=0
Storm reports for the day.
Here are the videos. FIRST OFF, I have to apologize for the few swear words (S-bombs). When we're staring at an impressive tornado, our tongues sort of get away from us without even realizing it. So, once again, sorry!!!!!