High Plains Drifter

Fast-moving HP Supercell at Shallow Water, Kansas

May 10th was the much advertised and much hyped (for good reason) tornado outbreak across the plains from southern Kansas into Oklahoma.  Since I was still on my 10pm to 6am shifts, I was on a tight leash, so I couldn’t venture far from Dodge City if I wanted to chase.  There was a target close to home with storms most likely developing by midday or shortly thereafter given the degree of forcing coming out with the compact upper low moving into southwest Kansas.  By late morning, there was an axis of instability developing across far west central and southwest kansas as the stratus was slowly eroding away at the western edge.  It was this corridor of instability where I focused my efforts on.  After about three hours of sleep, I woke up to find things on target for the most part.  My chase target was northwest of Garden City for the incipient storm development… and points northeast from there as the afternoon grew on.

I left Dodge City at 11am and headed north to Ness City then west toward Dighton.  By 12:30pm, convection was forming in the drier air between Lamar and Syracuse which was moving northeast toward the Hwy 50 corridor and the Syracuse area.  Radar was showing an east to west boundary developing and there appeared to be a convergence of fine lines on radar near the Garden City area.  I decided to drive south into northern Finney County and watch things unfold to my southwest.  As I got into clearing skies, the convective towers were obviously quite evident… including one to my distant south-southeast.  The cluster of disorganized showers and thunderstorms to the west-southwest were about to enter the higher moisture content around 1:00pm, but it was also cooler, which was a problem.  There just didn’t appear to be a whole lot of clearing farther to the east to widen the axis of instability for potential tornadogenesis.  By 1:30, storms finally increased in intensity west of Lakin, and this activity was moving northeast which would approach Hwy 83 between Garden City and Scott City, so I made my way west to Hwy 83.

When I reached Hwy 83, I was greeted to a massive updraft area to my southwest.  Tornado warnings were issued for storms farther north in the Leoti area.  It turned out that there was a small cluster of non-supercell, landspout tornadoes.  Oh well.  I drove north on Hwy 83 to Shallow Water when the storm to my southwest was wrapping up significantly.  This was turning into an HP beast, and I found myself in the notch of this thing.  I got out of the car to take a few images, but I couldn’t do that long, as this storm was racing northeast at 50 mph.

As I drove north through Shallow Water, the structure to my southwest was fairly impressive with a nice circular, striated updraft area with a low-contrast lowering wrapping in rain to my west-southwest.  Meanwhile, the wet RFD was racing north toward me fast.  I made it to Hwy 96, but about 4 to 6 miles east of Scott City, I was being buffetted by 60 mph south winds in the RFD.  This was really the beginning of the end of the excitement of this particular chase.  The storm quickly became an outflow dominant mess as I was continuing east toward Dighton.  I had some thoughts of just heading on home, but renewed updraft development on the old rear-flank gust front, which was now the leading edge of the synoptic dry intrusion, kept me just interested enough to continue following it.  I followed it to Utica and eventually Ransom in northern Ness County along Hwy 4. There was a new mesocyclone to my southwest…

…and shortly after 3:00pm or so, there was a report of a tornado with this circulation, however I never saw this.  Later on, I did see some photos of this feature, which was indeed a small, brief tornado.  Unless you were in the right spot, you would not have seen this (and I was not in the right spot plus I was driving while this was occurring apparently).  Storms moving 40 to 50 mph just do not give you the necessary amount of time to figure out what’s going on, especially when chasing solo.  Plus the fact, the cloud bases were so low because the storm was moving into the area of low stratus that had stuck around all day up until that point.  Not great conditions to photograph in.  The best photography would actually be behind the storms looking at them from the southwest in the drier air.  I entered Rush County and photographed some of the interesting convective underbelly of the storm in between the updraft area and the precipitation core.  This was somewhat photogenic, especially with a green wheat field in front of me.  This was around the 4:00pm time frame near McCracken.

I followed the storm as far east as the Hoisington-Russel longitude before giving up and heading back to Dodge City.  I didn’t see any tornado on this outbreak day, but it was an interesting chase nonetheless.

11 images from this day’s shoot:

first chase of the season — non-severe storms, Gove County, Kansas

My first attempt at a long-winded chase account was just erased after 30+ minutes of writing, and I’m not up to re-writing it… the upshot of it was that I chased quasi-linear multicell storms, of the non-severe variety, late in the evening on Thursday, April 15th.  I intercepted the storms just northwest of Quinter before heading south again on various farm roads of eastern Gove County.  The best images came around 8:15pm or so…

…around the time of sunset when I photographed beautiful colors with a cloud-base lowering present associated with the strong updraft (with cell “D3″ in the above radar image).  After the colors waned, I headed farther south on more county roads approaching Hwy 4.  The chase was pretty much over by that time as the storms had no more photographic interest due to weakening and no ambient light left.  Images below!  (NOTE TO SELF:  next time, draft your write-up in Wordpad, not the WordPress blog post window!!!  Ugh.)

…Woodward Late-evening Supercell…

(originally written August 20th for a storm chaser forum, slightly edited/uploaded to blog December 13th)

August 19th was a rather interesting day.  After the tornado watch conference call with the Storm Prediction Center at work, shift was over and I left DDC at about 4:15pm and headed down to a clumping Cu field in Woods/Alfalfa county. When I first left, a nice hard tower was evident distant southeast and when I looked at radar and saw the blips wayyy the hell southeast close to Enid, I thought this was a fool’s errand.  I got gas in Greensburg and contemplated heading home. I then noticed some agitated cumulus to my southwest. Observations showed southwest winds all around northwest OK… yet dewpoints were in the 65 to 67 degree range. Even with a southwest surface wind, there was still excellent deep layer shear across NW OK with the impinging upper jet streak from the northwest. It became clear as I was driving south toward Hwy 64 that the outflow boundary towers were just not doing it. I was rather surprised that I didn’t see atom-bomb city going on southeast. I wonder if there was a mesoscale gradient in convective inhibition (CINH) there that was just too much for the Enid towers as they were advected downstream to the east? Were these towers/plumes moving east or southeast? If they were moving due east, they would have crossed the boundary at a sharper angle and succumbed to the CINH faster… just not enough time to get that deep sustained moist convection process “jump started”.

These were the things that were actually running through my mind as I was watching this unfold from a distance to my southeast. Meanwhile, to my southwest, the boundary layer was deeper with lower 0-3km static stability and thus easier to “jump start” deep, moist convection. It’s all about initiation, and the direction of motion of towers once they initiate. Regarding that Enid area failed initiation, it just seemed to me that once plumes went up, they crossed the boundary and the strongly backed winds were doing a number on the “jump starting” process. Nice backed easterly winds are great once you have a well-established storm, obviously. What if the towers formed 20 miles farther west…such that they had more time to accumulate growth…before interacting with the higher CINH easterly flow east of the OFB? It could have been a much different story perhaps. I’m just thinking out loud here.

When I got to Hwy 64, I drove west and thought that I could get a good storm going around Harper-Ellis County, OK given the uniform lower static stability in the lower troposphere + CAPE still around 3000 J/kg. 800 to 1000 foot higher elevation also helps in this department for convective initiation… which is why I usually favor farther west for storm initiation. I’ve seen this song and dance before — fantastic looking soundings, good convergence, parcel theory suggesting CINH < 25 Joules… yet still nothing. In almost all these cases, there seems to be too sharp of a potential temperature gradient with initial storm motion vectors taking initial plumes into the cooler pot temps too quickly…and you just end up with anorexia.

Oh yeah, the northwest of Woodward storms were pretty photogenic. Saw a wall cloud at sunset northwest of Woodward, some incredible crepuscular rays radiating through a storm tower (the soon to be Woodward supercell)… there were actually two side-by-side initially.  The images below show the initial towering cumulus stage with the northeastern storm developing a nice structure toward sunset.  The western storm was the one that eventually took over to the northwest of Woodward, which is what the wall cloud images are from.

…Hailstorm, Rainbow, and a carpet of Sunflowers east of Greeley, CO…

I was very pleased with the outcome of this chase…despite the fact that the storm I followed was less than severe amidst dewpoint temperatures in the mid 40s east of Greeley, CO. This was the final day of a two-day chase, and I decided to make this day a chase day after interrogating model data early that morning. A very “cold” upper air trough for this time of year was still positioned across the northern Rockies with a smaller scale short-wave trough expected to rotate through southern Wyoming by afternoon. This would bring a shot of mid level cold advection with 500mb temps around -14C impinging on the Front Range by late afternoon. In this environment, even a surface parcel of about 77F over 45F dewpoint still yielded enough CAPE for a photogenic storm. You don’t need high CAPE for great storm photography in Colorado, especially with really good deep layer shear present — which was the case this day. I had a target around Limon initially, however I never made it down to the I-70 corridor. I drove southwest toward the Denver metro on I-76 instead.

I figured the best storms would be developing either right along the Front Range or just east. Given the depleted moisture from the prior night’s cold front, the best CAPE in return southeasterly flow would be banked up against the higher terrain. The drive down I-76 was interesting earlier in the day. Wildflowers… mainly wild sunflowers… were rampant. It was a very thick carpet of sunflowers in some of these fields for as far as the eye could see. It was a rather incredible sight — thanks to the wet spring and summer across the region. I drove as far southwest as Hudson, then west to I-25. By this time, a few weak showers dotted the Front Range from my southwest to west-northwest. A small storm was beginning to develop up near Cheyenne, which was quite visible from my location, so I drifted north on I-25 to position myself accordingly to keep this area in play — but I really didn’t want to pursue a storm that far north given the drive back I had to make to Dodge City. I drove as far north on I-25 as Wellington then east to near Nunn. I sat along a farm road between Wellington and Nunn for about an hour or so — becoming increasingly frustrated by how slow things were evolving. The showers off the mountains just weren’t cutting it — turning to garbage “virga bombs” as they rolled east toward me off the mountains.

After awhile, I became impatient, and the time was going past 5:00pm CDT. I was gettng hungry, so I stopped at a fast food joint and grabbed a quick dinner north of Greeley. Sure enough, taking my mind and eyes off the sky for a little bit did the trick! When I came out of the restaurant, there was a storm to my south-southeast…just exiting the northeastern fringes of the Denver metro. This was my target storm and I plotted an intercept southeast of Greeley following Hwy 34. After studying this storm for a bit both visually and on radar, it quickly became evident that this storm was a left-mover — in other words, the updraft region was on the north flank of the storm — and was moving quickly to the northeast. Given this, I needed to get north if I wanted to photograph the updraft region of the storm. I saw a county road on the map near the Riverside Reservoir — and it was a race against the hail core to get there. The northwestern fringes of the core reached me at the same time I reached my north option, so I had to blast north in order to stay ahead of it.

I drove north a good 7 or 8 miles before I get well enough ahead of the core, and by that time, most of the precip core was now going to be east of me as it tracked northeast. I found a spot to photograph the storm from looking east — another incredible field full of wild sunflowers! Incredible! The landscape, the distant hail core of the storm… all this color was just phenomenal. Then a partial rainbow formed, and the scene became even more spectacular! Wow!! I was having a field day tromping through waist-high wild sunflowers shooting this incredible scene. The ~ 15 minutes I spent at this one spot watching this sub-severe storm move away from me amidst this incredible field of yellow was well worth the two-day trip! No doubt about it.

This storm got away from me, but that was okay, there were more developing to pursue. I eventually went after a storm to my southwest, to the south of Keenesburg. I got ahead of this storm, which was the more traditional “right mover”, as the updraft region was on the south side. This storm was also sub-severe, but the updraft area was decently organized…although cloud-to-ground lightning was my main focus with this storm…and I managed to get a few images. I followed this storm until sunset east to Hwy 71 at Woodrow. It was a long drive back to Dodge City, arriving back home about 3:30am or so.

I was targeting the Sidney, NE area for supercell storms on August 15th.  I left Dodge City early in the morning and made it to Sidney by around 2:30 to 3:00pm or so.  The initial convection I was watching was north to northwest of Sidney, and I drove north to highway 26 at Broadwater.  I had a decision to make:  drive north on 385 to Alliance and follow the activity developing north of me…or head east-southeast toward a congested cumulus field closer to upper 60s dewpoints.  I chose the latter — heading east-southeast to Lake McConaughy.  An isolated storm developed northwest of the lake which was showing some interesting organized structure, but I could never find a good location to shoot this storm from as sunlight was really hampering photography opportunities… therefore I didn’t get any images of this storm.  When I repositioned farther south, the storm vanished at the blink of an eye it seemed like.  Even at this point, I still could have driven north to Arther and highway 92 area, but chose not to.  In the end, the highway 2 corridor from Alliance to Hyannis to Thedford was the place to be this day — or on I-70 in northwest Kansas where an isolated supercell thrived away from the MCS I was chasing.  The “butt” end of the linear storm complex I was only photogenic when the storms were northwest of the lake.  I drove north on a sand road called Berry Road north of the lake off highway 92.  The scenery was fantastic along this road!  Below are a few images of the storms northwest of me from along Berry Road north of Lake McConaughy: