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June 8th allowed us to continue our tornado streak for each tour of the 2019 season. Today’s landspouts were not the same type of tornadoes the other tours saw, but they were more photogenic.

After a chase day in eastern Colorado, we started today’s chase in Burlington. A potent shortwave trough would shift east from the Rockies into the Central Plains. There was southwesterly mid-level flow of about 40-knots that overspread much of the plains into the Dakotas. The dewpoint temps ranged in the mid-60s ahead of a surface boundary where temps were warming into the upper 80s. As a result, a corridor of decent instability ahead of the cold front developed by midafternoon.

After departing the hotel, we took a short trip into Colby, KS. While at the gas pump, the first tornado warning was issued. The storm developed from our origination point near Burlington. After topping off the tank, we drove back towards Burlington while observing that no tornado was present.

We pulled off the interstate at Goodland, KS to monitor the storm as it passed by. Soon afterward, a new area of interest developed just to our west, still over Colorado and within view. After watching for about an hour, a funnel descended from a flat base just to the north of Goodland. Soon afterward, we could see a small debris swirl on the ground associated with the funnel. This was a landspout tornado and the first of four for the day.

For a brief time, about five minutes, two tornadoes were present. Eventually, the second landspout tornado became more dominant as the first tornado roped out. We followed the storm south and east and witnessed two more tornadoes about 10 miles to the south of Brewster. Aside from the tornadoes, we also saw golf ball-sized hail. And there was a spectacular mammatus field that was amplified by a setting sun.

A day with non-destructive and photogenic tornadoes in open fields was a great way to end our 2019 season!

We started this day on Tour 3 in Colby, Kansas up near the Colorado/Nebraska border and headed south with an expected forecast of tornadic storms near the Dodge City, Kansas area.

Our timing was pretty spot on, we stopped in a small town just north of Dodge City to fuel the vehicles up and supercells were already building in the area, there were two of them.

Just as we got back on the highway, the one closest to us began a phase of rapid intensification and produced our first tornado of the day.

Just on the northern limits of Dodge City, we pulled over as Brian thought he saw a contrasting edge hidden in a wet core under the base of the northernmost supercell. Sure enough, with a bit of straining – the elusive Southwest Kansas tornado began to show itself!

It wasn’t the easiest tornado to see and the cameras had a difficult time with it, but it is visible in the photo posted here (the contrast had to be blown out of the photo to bring the tornado out in the photo – this tornado was wrapped in heavy rain, not always visible, but in this case it was).

After the stovepipe tornado roped out, we quickly made our way through Dodge City as the storm was approaching from the west. We had to go all the way through the city to catch our next highway which would take us east and allow us to stay ahead of the storm.

After we were 10 or so miles ahead of the storm, near a small unincorporated town named Kingsdown, we stopped and set up the cameras. We now had the more southern supercell heading straight towards us and it was looking better than ever!

We decided to let the storm pass just to our north and as it did, it produced an incredibly low hanging wall cloud that was quickly rotating. The entire base of the storm seemed to be dragging the ground, literally about a one-mile-wide area of rotation right in front of us.

It’s difficult in these situations to see any specific spin-ups on the ground, but the entire rotating base had basically become a giant multi-vortex wedge tornado! The tornado report from 2235 confirmed the tornado: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/reports/180529_rpts.html

May 16th was a needle in a haystack kind of day. The Storm Prediction Center issued an Enhanced Risk of convective storms from Midland, Texas to extreme northern Iowa. A Slight Risk area covered eight states!

We decided to focus on the dryline in the Texas Panhandle where there was steady boundary of moisture under and advancing shortwave trough. It did not dissapoint!

By mid-afternoon, several supercells were starting to pop along the dryline. One storm in particular near McLean caught our attention. The area had everything we needed for a busy afternoon, shear, moisture, instability and lift. The stage for an exciting chase in the Texas Panhandle was set!

We got our first tornado from a wall cloud with extremely fast erratic motion. The tornado was primarily over open country, where we like to see them. We witnessed the tornado from birth to death and it had a wild rope out stage, which happened very close to our location providing the tour group with some amazing photos!

The storm structure was fantastic and also included some very large hail of at least baseball size.