Well, I did actually chase, although it was a fruitless endeavour other than the fact that I did get out and play with some of the new equipment, mainly my new wireless internet setup with the kyocera air card and Alltel Axcess Mobilelink. I am pleased with the signal and service so far in western KS. Since Alltel digital service is operated on the CDMA network, signals extend farther out than GSM which is what Cingular and a few other providers use. There’s an Alltel CDMA tower in just about every KS county seat, and I could pretty much verify that on this short chase. The only areas where signal faded to “no signal” where right near the county borders. All in all, it was fun to check out the latest high res visible satellite imagery, short-fuse composite graphics, and a myriad of other data and websites out in the middle of nowhere Hamilton County, KS at a download speed just under that of DSL.
As far as the chase went… well, nothing formed on the dryline along the KS-CO border; there just wasn’t enough convergence as the short-wave trough was still too far to the southwest by late afternoon. Plus, increasing cirrostratus negated any outside chance of initiation by 430 or 5pm. I left and headed back to Dodge after sitting around the Syracuse, KS area for awhile. Got back around 630pm in time to take a long nap before my first mid shift. Am watching potential dryline opportunity Tuesday 7th… we’ll see. I’d have to forego bowling if it looks like anything worth pursuing within a 2 hour radius of Dodge.
… 9 to 11″ with major tree damage in Castle Rock …
The event is winding down early this evening, but not before dumping nearly a foot of snow in the Castle Rock area. The big winner with this event appears to be the Bennet-Strasburg area where a solid foot and a half had fallen. I took many photos of the event, which I will begin posting to my Oct 10 Snowstorm Gallery Page. I’m going to catch up on some sleep this evening. I plan to head back to Dodge tomorrow morning. This was certainly worth the trip!
… 7.1″ measured as of 920am MDT in Castle Rock…
Since around 7am, averaging about 3/4″ per hour rate. This kind of snowfall rate is expected at least through mid-afternoon. It looks like the big winner so far east of the mountains is along I-70 just east of Denver. Persistent 25-35dbz echoes all morning in the area around Bennett to Strasburg. Reports of 9 to 12″ already out there.
… 5.6 inches at 720am MDT …
Snow is starting to pile up pretty good now on surfaces other than pavement. The parking lot here is a giant slush pool. I’ll get out and take some photos a little bit later this morning. The surface winds are strongly northwest, which is really preventing the good 25dbz+ snows from getting to I-25. Some of these echoes are, however, edging slightly westward as deeper tropospheric upslope maximizes this morning through early this afternoon.
… 3.3 inches as of 230am MDT …
I have uploaded a few photos at http://www.underthemeso.com/gallery2/stormchase/chase05/2005oct10/
I found a decent measuring spot on a trailer bed that is elevated off the ground. Some melting and settling will make measuring difficult, but still think a solid foot to foot and a half is a good possibility by midnight tonight. The strongest lift will be continuing through mid afternoon. I’m gonna catch some Z’s for about 5 or 6 hours…and by the time I wake up, there should be about 3 or 4 more inches accumulation.
9pm MDT. I have been in Castle Rock for an hour now and when I arrived the temperature was 38 degrees with light rain. As of the time of this writing, I look out the window and see quite a few small flakes… so we have changed over. There is a huge area of moderate to heavy precip to the southeast that is moving northwest towards my area. This should be the beginning of “the show” for the urban corridor. I sit here at 6200 feet. The latest NAM brings the total QPF down just a little bit, but still an impressive amount of snow no matter how you slice it. A good foot and a half still looks good here in Castle Rock! -Mu
…Columbus Day Snow Chase — Castle Rock, CO…
Greetings everyone! Well this is a first for me. I have never done a snow chase before, but the timing couldn’t have been more perfect for me. I have both Columbus Day and Tuesday off, which coincides perfect with the timing of what looks to be a major snowstorm for the Colorado “urban corridor”. Both the GFS and the NAM models suggest upwards of two feet of snow south and southwest of Denver by late Monday Night or early Tuesday. Given the unusual early timing of such a powerful snow storm for this area, it may present some problems with numerous trees coming down as many of them have not lost their leaves yet.
I plan to leave Dodge City this afternoon around 2:30pm (Central time) and expect to arrive at my destination of Castle Rock, CO around 7:00pm (Mountain time). It should be raining by the time I get there, but rapidly change to snow sometime between 8pm and 10pm Mountain time. It may even changeover before I arrive. Castle Rock sits at about 6200 feet in elevation which will be plenty high enough for this storm system. Heavy snow will fall overnight tonight and continue heavy through the first half of Monday. By dawn, there may be 8 to 10″ already on the ground, with an additional 8 to 10″ on top of that. Thankfully, the warm ground will prevent a huge accumulation on roads, but if it snows that hard, it really won’t matter much. I hope to document this event extensively through photography and videography as it could be a national news story if there really is widespread 20″ or more of snow in the highly populated areas of the I-25 corridor. -Mike
Jay Antle and I ended our 2005 chase vacation on a good note. We intercepted 3 supercell thunderstorms near the Southwest KS-Eastern OK Panhandle border on Thursday 16th. We left GLD and decided to head down to DDC for a mid-afternoon data stop. Midday short-fuse composite (weather.gov/ddc/short.html) was pointing at far NW OK area south of DDC right along the state border for several hours… and it was based of this information that we pretty much committed to heading south of Dodge. Hard towers went up to our SSW through WSW by the time we got to Dodge. We stopped by my place for data real quick, only to find my damn cable was out. So much for that idea… we had to get back on the road.
We targetted the storm with a developing overshoot southwest of Englewood. We had to punch through some marginally severe hail, but after emerging on the south side we had a great view of the supercell updraft base along with a western supercell updraft over Meade County. We watched these two storms from a high spot on US283 right along the state line (maybe a mile south into OK) for a good while. Our eastern storm was becoming increasingly stretched out/linear and outflow dominant, yet producing Softballs near Ashland to our northeast.
We had northeast outflow winds at our location, but what was interesting was the fact that the winds were actually fairly warm. These winds became more easterly and ESE as the southeastern Meade Co. storm to our northwest began to really crank. A very organized wall cloud developed… classic blocky one at that… with relatively modest rotation… nothing violent, however. We let this action approach our location from the northwest…and the wall cloud itself began to take on a liberty bell appearance on the downshear side with great upward motion. Transparent rotating rain curtains were developing signifiying the presence of a "radar hook" and a classic clear slot developed.
Stacatto CGs then began bolting near us (deja vu of June 12th in Kent Co. TX) and we had to get back in the car. Rotation increased further and we did get a persistent pencil-shaped funnel looking almost due west… probably a couple miles south of the state border north of Knowles. This funnel was in the right spot in the occluded wall cloud with wrapping rain curtains. In my book, based on recent events in Trego County 6/9 captured by Jim Leonard on I-70 (rotating rain curtain invisible multi-vortex tornado) this was probably a weak tornado… I’ll leave it to Jay to review the video.
It didn’t take long for the storm to gust out with small dust foots and the like. We also heard of the tornado reports near Knowles that Rob Satkus mentioned after the storm had "gusted out" and believe these were only gustnadoes/dust foots and nothing
more.
Based on the evolution to outflow dominance, we decided to head west on 64 to catch the Sublette-Tice tornadic supercell. It also gusted out somewhat, however, it developed excellent supercell updraft structure once again as it approached our location near Forgan, OK.
This would be the last supercell intercept of the chase, and a close to one awesome chase vacation that included tornado intercepts from Montana south to Texas.
-Mike
Wednesday the 15th marked the 2nd to last day of my chase vacation. Jay and I spent the past two days in the southern Rockies. We started Wednesday in Gunnison, CO heading east on 50… stopping at Monarch Pass for some excellent views via a ride up the gondola… well worth the $7.
We then headed east on Hwy 94 out of COS and noted some towers trying to go up on the Palmer Divide south and southeast of LIC. We drove to Kit Carson and realized, looking at the sky and radar (I tapped into WIFI, somehow, in BFE Kit Carson CO!)…that the "show" wasn’t going to materialize like we had hoped and the "cluster-F*" was fully materializing by 5pm. We did get one decent view ahead of one of the storms northwest of Kit Carson… but this was it before the gates of outflow dust HELL opened up.
The following couple of hours were the worst experience of convective dirt storms Jay and I had been on during a chase. Dry microbursts every direction, including numerous gustnadoes… there was no escape.
We went through the small town of Weskan, KS and noticed at least one foot diamater tree limbs/trunks snapped off. We then decided to stop in Sharon Springs to decide how to escape this dirt hell. After topping off the tank we found a nice hotel, believe it or not, in Sharon Springs with a next door old 50s style diner. Not 30 seconds after getting a Wifi connection to look at radar, the entire town of Sharon Springs became one dirty hurricane scene. Visib went to ZERO with dumpsters full of trash tossed around at the hotel and numerous other loose objects being thrown around. We estimated gusts at least 65 to 70 mph… but the dirt was the big issue. What a mess. Power went out in town as we sat in the parking lot in front of the diner. We decided enough was enough and we high-tailed it north 30 miles to GLD to end this messy convective dust storm. More dry microbursts were visible around GLD as we approached before the storms moved east. Yeesh!!
Tomorrow looks like far SW KS into the OK Panhandle? Nice and close to Dodge, hopefully, for my last chase day.
I chased with Jay Antle and Matt Crowther, along with Jim Leonard on June 12th. Once the tornado frenzy ensued, Jim Leonard did his own thing, as usual, and got some spectacular video of the large cone with the collar cloud from hell. Jay, Matt, and I remained on Hwy 208 the whole time, and observed the large cone from a distance (after the first truncated cone >> stovepipe event (1 or 2 tornadoes?) in lower contrast before wrapping in rain. Right after this, we figured we needed to keep going south to get out of the CG barrage and forward flank rain (shear vector had some northerly component)… and this decision cost us the following wedge… as we began to note awesome inflow tail to the growing supercell due southwest.
We immediately targetted the southern supercell west-southwest of Clairemont. In retrospect, given the awesome structure of this updraft, I don’t regret missing the wedge stage (the wedge could have only been seen from quite close, from some of the other chasers’ images I’ve seen with very low to the ground collar cloud). The southern supercell updraft structure…before it became the dominant storm…was just an awesome barrel. I got some pretty decent stills of the updraft from CR 440 just off of Hwy 70 southeast of Clairemont. This storm rapidly became very interesting with large occluded wall cloud and probable weak tornado. Several other classic tornadoes followed as we headed southeast on Hwy 70 as the "hordes" of chasers were beginning to catch back up with us… since we were out ahead of most everyone. I got stills of everything except the large cone since we were in a poor photography location… did get good zoomed in video though. Great day!
Off to the mountains for a couple days with Jay before hopefully catching some Colorado/Wyoming storms Wed-Thurs before my vacation ends.
It was great chasing with Matt Crowther and Jim Leonard… thanks for the awesome fun guys.
crudely processed digital photography
