Chase Highlights

We started our day from Garden City, Kansas. I met the storm chasing group in the hotel lobby, not many of them were bright and cheery.

It’s common for our customers to look over the Convective Outlook issued by the Storm Prediction Center. This morning’s outlook didn’t show much promise for the day and that had the group down a bit. SPC issued a marginal risk for much of Tornado Alley. As such, the group was expecting me to call a “severe clear” day and look for alternative activities. But, I had different plans.

I typically don’t look at SPC’s Convective Outlooks. I do like to include them in our chase logs here on the website because it adds depth to the account. But, I prefer to forecast the day’s probabilities myself using numerical forecast models and I thought the day actually did hold some promise. My initial target area for the day was Salina, Kansas.

I spent an hour going over my forecasting thoughts with the tour group to get us all on the same page. There was a steady flow of deep moisture from the south. Dewpoints into the high 60s were reaching as far as the Nebraska border. Aside from moisture, there was a dry air punch near the Interstate-35 corridor in central Kansas. Forecast MUCAPE, however, was rather low at about 1500 j/kg forecast.

Once we arrived in Salina a few small storms begin to fire up. As a result, we relocated to a familiar parking area near Bennington, Kansas about 25-miles north.

This was the same parking lot where we witnessed a monster wedge tornado from just a few years prior. Today, we sat in that same parking space and watched yet another tornado birth, amazing!

There were a total of four tornadoes from this isolated supercell. The largest was a long-track violent EF4 tornado that was on the ground for over an hour and was a half-mile wide at times.

This tornado developed just north of Niles Kansas around 7:07 pm. It moved ESE damaging and destroying everything in its path as it passed about two miles north of Abilene.

It then weakened for a time as it moved to the northeast of Abilene. However, it re-intensified and took a southeast turn as it approached Interstate 70. Then, it went on to produce the most severe damage after crossing the interstate just a mile or two southwest of Chapman.

The photo provided here with the truck in it was taken from an interstate overpass. This was when the tornado was at its widest, a full-blown wedge. The tornado then moved east passing one mile south of Chapman and finally dissipated at 8:37 pm just west of the Dickinson and Geary County line.

We zig-zagged along the back roads and stayed well east of it. We had almost perfect views of the storm for nearly an hour before it finally roped out.

A remarkable day that started with little hope. The lesson learned today was that a Convective Outlook risk area doesn’t always come to fruition. In fact, there have been many high risk days that have fallen flat and many marginal risk days that end with outbreaks.

That said, the team at SPC is no doubt the best tornado forecasters in the world. With the low CAPE forecast, this day was indeed a marginal risk. But even a marginal risk day can end with a tornado outbreak.

Storm chasing days like this are both frustrating and rewarding. The day ended with a tornado forecast validation. However, the tornado happened after sunset.

Chasing storms at night not only makes it more difficult to obtain good photos of the tornado. But also changes the way in which we pursue a storm due to possible flash floods.

The Storm Prediction Center had issued a Slight Risk covering most of western Texas and Oklahoma.

Additionally, an Enhanced Risk area was issued for much of the South Plains. The day, however, looked to struggle from limited moisture return.

We targeted an area just north of the Enhanced Risk area, hoping for the Caprock to provide its magic and create the lifting mechanism that would be needed for today’s forecast.

We began the chase while flying the drone. I captured some nice videos of the beginning stages of the supercell while it was over farmland.

The storm began to rapidly intensify and came very close to producing a tornado quite a few times during the daylight. However, the supercell remained low-precipitation and never fully matured to the tornado producing stage.

Just after sunset, we were ready to give up because it became to difficult to monitor the base. As we were backing out to drive away, I caught a glimpse under the base when a lightning strike illuminated it – I thought I saw a tornado!

I pulled back into the spot and waited for the night lightning strike to once again illuminate the base.

Validating this tornado was difficult. The lightning wasn’t constant enough to get a good visual. I knew from the radar that we were safe as we were a few miles to the east.

The radar was also indicating a velocity couplet, which helped to confirm my suspicion of a tornado. I decided to set up a still camera and take some long exposure photographs hoping that we’d get our confirmation from photo evidence.

Within a minute, another lightning strike backlight the base and I checked the camera – tornado confirmed! A few minutes after that we saw power flashes on the ground as the tornado was moving through powerlines and causing the transformers to explode.

We had to move further away than we’d normally attempt for safety reasons to continue to monitor the storm. Eventually, we were starting to get pinned in by the road networks.

Not wanting to travel through the Palo Duro at night during a potential flash flood, I decided to end the chase. We went south to get away from the storm, and then back west to the Interstate for the trip to Amarillo.

An exciting end to a mediocre chase day. All it took was a low-level jet to intensify after the sunset to give this little storm just enough to shear to create a tornado.

On May 21st the storms were few, but the storm chasers got an amazing sunset!

What started as a somewhat messy cluster of storms eventually transformed into one of the most beautiful supercell thunderstorms I’ve seen in the Great Plains in more than 25-years!

It was a fairly classic triple-point set up, very common in western Kansas. Warm and moist air flooded into the region from the south as a dry line strengthened near the Colorado-Kansas border.

The dry line is a boundary between dry and moist air, acting as a conduit for storm formation. In addition, a warm front draped across the area.

The warm front helped turn a mess of storms into a more focused zone of intense activity. From there, a magical scene was born.

We intercepted one tornado from this storm, but it was difficult to see from our vantage point due to being rain-wrapped. There were a lot of storm chasers out.

The big show, however, was the supercell structure of this incredible storm! I decided to go back east and set up for some time-lapsed video since the storm structure was intense. As I was shooting video, we were getting pelted with golfball-sized hail.

By far, this was one of the prettiest supercells I have witnessed, the sunset just topped off the vista. This is the reason why we chase storms! I could have stayed in that moment forever.

An exciting day of storm chasing in south-central Texas, which ended with a busted windshield due to hail! We started in the day in Lubbock and worked our way south towards Eldorado where we intercepted a decent looking, well-structured supercell with a rotating base.   Hopes were up as the storm began to lower and built an intense-looking rotating wall cloud, but this storm wouldn’t produce a tornado, even though it tried very hard to do so!

Our road options weren’t “picture perfect,” but the storm was traveling due east, so we traveled along with it on highway 190 towards Menard. Near Fort McKavett, the storm began a more southeasterly track and crossed the highway in front of us.  With little road options open, our only choice was to either lose sight of the updraft base, or punch through the core of the storm to advance our position to the next available south road option — we decided to take the adventurous route and 10 minutes later, the windshield in the lead chase van was completely destroyed by hail, which also completely covered highway 190!

It became obvious after punching through the storm that it was going to get away from us as it gained forward speed and moved over the South Texas Hill Country. We decided to fly the drone and shoot some video from the air as we parted ways with the floating icebox, then headed back into San Angelo and set up an appointment for a new windshield.