High Plains Drifter

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:

I was able to chase close to home on Friday, 7/31 since I was on midnight shifts.  It was another intriguing northwest flow setup across western Kansas as a cold front was pushing into the region with pretty decent low level moisture (dewpoints in the lower 60s) ahead of it.  I wasn’t planning on chasing because I originally thought the best storms would be 2 hours or more from Dodge City, which is just about my limit for a midnight shift.  When I saw a storm forming in Gove County after I woke up from a nap at about 6:30pm, I decided that this was a chaseable storm since it would essentially be moving in the direction of Dodge City.  So I left at around 7:00pm or so for Cimarron and then north toward Dighton.  I got a good view of the updraft region of the storm north of Dighton and I followed some farm roads east of Hwy 23 northeast of Dighton.  I then inched north toward Hwy 4 near Shields closer to the updraft region.  I sat at a spot just a mile north of Hwy 4 just northeast of Shields and photographed a fairly nice structured supercell updraft with a rather circular “mothership” appearance.  Rotation at cloud base was quite obvious, but rather broad I thought.  Since this was a northwest flow environment and rather high bases typical of western Kansas storms, I wasn’t really giving much thought to a substantial tornado threat, and I concentrated my effort on structure.  Little did I know that another storm chaser closer in was observing some weak, brief funnels and even a tornado or two (Roger Hill/Silver Lining Tours) way back in the rain-wrapped occluded area of the supercell to my north.  I continued photographing the structure of the storm along Hwy 4 toward Utica… and around 9:10pm or so, I observed a fairly concentrated dust plume in the RFD region of the supercell.  I believe this was a focused RFD surge causing dust to be kicked up beneath it, because at cloud base the rotation was extremely broad and not overly intense.  Nevertheless, RFD surges like this are an instigator to tornadogenesis many times, and I watched this closely with quite a bit of interest.  I was losing the structure from this vantage point and I drifted closer to Utica at around 9:30pm to photograph a wonderful “mothership” striated updraft structure to my west-northwest.  Around this time, Roger Hill reported a truncated narrow cone shaped tornado in the occluded area of the storm.  I believe I photographed this feature at 9:28pm.  I then drifted south on a farm road south of Utica…which met up with Hwy 96… and photographed the storm one last time at around 9:37pm.  Coincidentally, this was the time Roger also reported another brief tornado to his north.  I am thinking Roger was not far from me on this same road just north of me given his SpotterNetwork report.  I think I have evidence of his slanted, truncated “pencil” shaped tornado at 9:37pm looking north-northeast. After this, I drove back to Dodge City, arriving back home shortly after 11:00pm, in time for work at midnight.

I have contrast-enhanced some of my images to reveal some of these likely small, rather short-lived tornadoes, which are described below.

Below is a hyper contrast-enhanced image at 8:30pm looking north with the Shields, KS grain elevator on the horizon.  This contrast-enhanced image reveals a fairly well-defined funnel cloud amidst the precipitation core extending halfway to the ground from cloud base from this point of view:

Below is a contrast-enhanced image at 9:28pm looking to the west-northwest from a location along Hwy 4 about a mile or so west of Utica, KS.  This shows a fairly convincing truncated cone-shaped funnel extending about 2/3 of the way to the ground:

Below are two contrast-enhanced images about 9 minutes after the previous image above.  This was shot looking north-northeast in the direction of Utica, KS from a location along an unpaved county road about 6 miles or so south of Hwy 4.  These were shot at around 9:37pm:

11 seconds after the previous image:

…The Great Bend LP Supercell…

My target from Dodge City was pretty much anywhere along a line from roughly Pratt to Larned to Hays. First I was favoring the northern end of this line, then I began to favor the southern end of this line right as I was about to leave Dodge City at about 3pm… but in the end, I ultimately decided to just play the middle — Larned. I arrived in Larned to find some towering cumulus growth from my west-southwest to north-northwest. I just decided to hang out here on the outskirts of town to watch things evolve. I called my friend Robin Lorenson who was going to be out chasing as well… she started out in Salina. Her target was Great Bend, so we were not far from each other. We just decided that since we were so close we should just chase together. We met up on Hwy 19 about 7 miles east of Larned. At the time I was most interested in the small cell trying to develop just to our northwest. We also watched with interest the aggressive cumulus congestus development to our southeast which would become the Kingman supercell. We sat at this spot for some time watching our small shower struggle against some drier air. The best pooling of upper 60s to near 70 dewpoints was farther north. A storm rapidly took nice shape on radar and we could pick out the base in the distant north. This would become our target storm so we headed north for the intercept. We took Hwy 56 northeast to Pawnee Rock then north on county roads from that point on. We stopped a couple times north of Pawnee Rock once we got a good view of the structure of this storm. It was a beautiful LP supercell! Our second stopping point along this county road was a beautiful view from atop a hill. The storm had a nice flared base, a small wall cloud, broiling convection atop this, and a wonderful backsheared anvil.

From this point on, Robin and I chased separately as she headed north to photograph from closer in while I continued my structure chasing from the south. I followed it south and east through the Great Bend Airport area south to the Stafford County line until the storm ultimately died a rapid death around sunset. What a great way to conclude my 3-day chase weekend!!

Sunday, July 19th was another very successful day of high plains storm photography.  It wasn’t a day with a long-lived isolated supercell, but that wasn’t needed Sunday.  I came away with at least a couple of images that will certainly make a nice addition to my 2009 storm portfolio — including one special lightning shot that will be titled “Right Between the Ears” (image number 2 below) — a unique image of a tall, single, branched lightning flash in the distance amidst a narrow hail core composed perfectly between the two small isolated mounds that make up “Rabbit Ear Mountain” to the north of Clayton, NM.  I actually  managed to get two brilliant cloud-to-ground daytime flashes with Rabbit Ear Mountain in the frame.

After this, storms became more organized with better structure, and I drove northwest about 10 miles or so on Hwy 64 and watched some real interesting storm structure develop.  I then headed south of Clayton on Hwy 402 — a highway I had now become familiar with these past couple days — as a well-rounded circular structured storm updraft developed just to my west.  I needed to get east ahead of this, and I did so taking Hwy 102 which turned into Ranch 808 as it crossed into Texas west of Dalhart.  I photographed some really close cloud-to-ground flashes, both of which were a bit over-exposed unfortunately, before I ended the chase.  Images from this chase are below.

…Long-lived picturesque LP-ish supercell from northeast of Clayton, NM to northwest of Clovis, NM…

My target was Clayton, NM area, and I arrived there around Noon CDT eager to have some mexican food at the Eklund Saloon — only arriving to find out that the Eklund is closed… at least temporarily according to the signage on the doors.  Lets hope that it is just temporary.  Anyway, after a lunch at another restaurant, I drifted north of town to watch some cumulus development.  I was keying in on the area north of Clayton where the best surface convregence was.  I drove back into town to get some gas and noticed on SpotterNetwork that Roger Hill and Silver Lining Tours (SLT) was pulling into town.  I saw them pull into the Pizza Hut so I went in there to say hey to Roger briefly, then I was on my way again.  I went back to the same spot… a nice overlook on Hwy 370 north of Clayton by a few miles.  The first decent storm to develop went up east of me — to the southeast of Boise City, so I decided to at least hedge my bets east… keeping a close eye to my north still, which was where I was actually a little more interested based on surface obs.  Sure enough, as I begin driving out of Clayton on Hwy 56 to the northeast, an updraft began to explode to my north.  I wanted to watch this, so I peeled off Hwy 56 on a farm road in extreme southwest Cimarron County, OK between Felt, OK and Clayton, NM.  The new storm had a beautiful pancake anvil and after an initial split, began to really develop nicely into a formidable rotating soda can updraft!  I watched this thing drift south toward me, but eventually headed south to stay ahead of this.

Another storm was developing east of me…a storm between the one I was on looking north and the southeast of Boise City storm.  This had a beautiful updraft with long beaver tail on the north side and even a lowered feature beneath the base.   I continued south to Ranch 808 where I decided to head west.  In this mid-upper level flow environment, I usually do not want to be east of the storm at all… it’s better to be due south or southwest of the updraft area.  So I decided to head west into New Mexico to Hwy 402.  The drive along Hwy 402 was very nice with a great view of the backside broiling convection looking to the east-southeast at the supercell.  I finally made it to Nara Visa and Hwy 54 where I continued southwest.  I leap-frogged Roger Hill again along Hwy 54… the first time was up when the storm first developed east of Clayton.  I had lost data connection for some time while on Hwy 54 including going through Logan until I got closer to I-40.  As the storm approached I-40, it was looking very nice visually — perhaps the strongest the storm ever got was when it was northeast of San Jon on approach to I-40.  I continued south on Hwy 39 stopping a couple times to photograph the structure.  It had some very nice RFD occlusions, but the storm was high-based with no tornado threat (despite the one tornado warning Albequerque issued).  One of the stopping locations was atop San Jon Hill, which is where Roger Hill and SLT pulled up.  This was an excellent view overlooking some small canyon landscape carved out by one of the tributaries of the Canadian River — and the supercell storm approaching!  The structure, though by this time, was beginning to wane unfortunately.  Nevertheless, it was a beautiful spot to photograph a storm from, and it was nice to share this scene with Roger and his chase tour guests.

So I continued south on state routes as the storm was now moving more and more to the southwest with time.  It was starting to get dark, so I wanted to get closer to Clovis where my hotel reservation was.  I reached a point about 15 miles north of Clovis with the storm still to my northwest…wanting to get closer to the updraft one last time.  As I was doing so, about a mile into my west jog off of Hwy 209, the underbelly of the storm was illuminated a brilliant pink… as if a spotlight was shining on the storm from below.  This was extremely vivid, and I don’t recall seeing anything quite like this before.  I scrambled to get my D3 onto the tripod because I knew this color wasn’t going to last.  I got the shot!  It was an absolutely breathtaking scene.  The pink was just incredible on the weakening storm updraft to the west-northwest!!  I stayed there for a little while longer as some of the color lingered… and I had the D200 on the tripod now to photograph some lightning.  I managed to get a couple CG’s and one nice crawler.  What a way to finish off an amazing chase day!!  Below are 10 images from the chase:

…Highly photogenic & vivid lightning outside of Lipscomb, Texas…

at 5:45pm, I really had no idea I would be having probably my finest lightning photography shoot of the year in the next 3 to 4 hours — but that’s what happened.  I got home from work at a quarter after 4 and took a nap for almost an hour and a half!  I woke up, looked at the radar and noticed that a decent storm had formed west of Liberal… moving slowly east.  I figured that since the action was likely going to stay out of the Dodge City forecast area, it was probably okay to skip town since they wouldn’t need extra help at work.  So at 6pm, I took off.  It was another one of these totally spontaneous, impromtu chases with no pre-planning whatsoever.  I just looked at the radar and said “I’m gonna chase this”, and left.  I was originally thinking about going down to Englewood and meet the storms as they moved closer to there, but they were not moving as fast as I thought… so instead of going due south to Englewood, I drove southwest to Meade…then south from there into the Oklahoma Panhandle.  The first storm that developed, which prompted me to go on this chase, ultimately died, but I figured more would form based on short-term model signals and the decent environment with marginal wind shear and pretty good instability.  Another storm formed farther south…along the OK-TX Panhandle border near the town of Booker, TX.  I drove south from Hwy 270 continuing south on Hwy 23 to Booker.  I had to punch the core, but there wasn’t much to it other than a lot of rain and some gusty north winds.  It didn’t take long to get to the other side of this fairly small storm.  I stopped briefly to try to shoot some structure from the southwest side looking northeast… but the structure wasn’t all that great.  The wind was, though, gusting to near 60 mph at times from the north.  It was a chore to keep hold the car door open when I was getting my gear out to shoot.  I went south further to Ranch 3260 and followed it east.  At this point, I wasn’t overly encouraged by the structure of this storm.  Soon, however, as I approached Hwy 305 at Lipscomb, I noticed some increased development in the front updraft flank of the storm.  I wanted to find a good high spot to pull off and just observe things for awhile.  I did this just east of Lipscomb on a paved county road (County Road T) about a mile or two east of town.  For the next hour, at this same location, I watched a storm develop quite nice updraft structure… only to eventually go on to put on a spectacular and mesmorizing cloud-to-ground lightning show that I would photograph with the lightning trigger.  I went from thinking that this was a stupid evening driving exercise in futility — to damn glad I decided to make this run — in a span of about 20 minutes!  It was so much fun to just sit there and photograph this storm and the associated lightning from the same spot.  Below are 9 images from this awesome one-hour moment in time: