High Plains Drifter

Pawnee City, NE Supercell & Oregon to Amity, MO Supercell

Robin and I left North Platte around 9:30am with a target of Hebron, NE in mind.  I really didn’t envision us ending the day along the I-35 corridor in northwestern Missouri, though!  …but it was worth it.  We photographed two photogenic supercells, the first of which developing near the KS-NE border southwest of Pawnee City.  This storm showed some signs of tornadogenesis early on when it was southwest of Pawnee City, however it struggled against some of its own outflow.  Nevertheless, this was probably the most photogenic supercell I’ve photographed in southeastern Nebraska.  We had a decision to make as we continued east on Hwy 8  on approach to Salem and Falls City — do we continue our intercept of the original storm or do we go after much better looking development east of us — a much more difficult intercept.  The atmosphere made the decision for us.  The southern supercell took over while our original storm was falling apart.  The backside of the southern supercell was spectacular.  The convection was like an atom bomb going off in front of us.  As we crossed the Missouri River at Rulo, we continued to get closer, approaching the hook echo region of the supercell from the back side.  We got into some of the precipitation as we approached Oregon.  None of the precipitation was hail…. but as we drove into Oregon, that’s all we saw on the ground.  Lots of giant hail.  We didn’t stop in town in favor of trying to get ahead of the storm, but in retrospect, I wish we would have stopped to photograph some of these hail stones.  They were absolutely huge, and we didn’t miss this hail fall by much — maybe as little as 5 to 10 minutes.

We reached I-29 with the hail core just barely to our east, and we managed to make it to Hwy 36 at St. Joseph where we continued east.  We then headed north on Hwy 6 toward Clarksdale where we refueled and continued on our way.  We stopped a couple miles south of where Hwy 6 curved to the east (about 6 miles west of Amity) where we photographed the supercell structure and wrapping rain curtains.  The wrapping rain curtains to our NNE was significant.  There was likely a substantial ground circulation amidst this wrapping rain curtain area, but it could not tighten up into a tornado circulation.  It was close, though!  We back-tracked to Hwy 36 and continued east, stopping at times to photograph the structure to our north.  This was some of the finest storm structure I’ve ever seen this far east — certainly the best Missouri storm structure I’ve photographed.  I was impressed — it was almost like chasing a storm on the High Plains — very contrasting colors with good visibility.  As we approached I-35 it was getting to be close to 9:00pm and we had to end the chase given the drive we had to make back home.  I had a very fun time these past 3 days chasing with my good friend Robin Lorenson.  Certainly another reminder for sure how much easier it is to multi-task having a chase partner — since I chase solo so often.  Thanks Robin!  Some images from this chase below:

The One-Hour Pure Gentleman’s Chase — Dodge City, KS Supercell

I worked the day shift on June 9th, and I got off shift at 4:00pm.  I had planned all along to work overtime given severe weather development across our forecast area.  That being said, by 4:00pm, there was nothing on radar across all of our forecast area, so I agreed to be called back if I was needed back for help.  After a 20-minute nap, I got a call from Matt Crowther asking about a new storm developing southwest of DDC.  I didn’t know anything about it at the time (about 4:30pm by now), so a quick glance at radar had me intrigued.  It had a nice little shape to it and was moving in the general direction of DDC.  So, I decided to go after it, only a 15 mile drive to the southwest from my duplex to the updraft seen in the first image.  As this was moving northeast, I had to keep moving northeast too… back toward Dodge City.  I took north bypass through the north part of town all the way to the US-283 junction, about 2.5 miles northeast of the Dodge City airport.  It was at that time that one of my evening shift co-workers called me back in.  It was at this time that I photographed images #2 through#5 below of the awesome updraft structure and menacing near-ground activity (in images #4 and #5, you can see the KDDC WSR-88D radome in the distance!).  The tall precip shaft adjacent the updraft was beautiful!  After I shot these images, I drove to the office…. toward this supercell.  I didn’t make it to the WFO DDC driveway before the golfball size hail.  Heavy and hard golfball to 2″ diameter hail pelted me as I entered the WFO parking lot.  The last two images in this series below are from the WFO parking lot.  What an awesome 1-hour, 30-mile round trip gentleman’s chase!!

Robin Lorenson and I photographed three different supercells across southwestern Nebraska.  Our target was Ogallala to Sidney to Julesburg, which allowed us to hang around Ogallala for the better part of the afternoon along with Matt Crowther, Scott Bell, and Dave Blanchard.  The first supercell we photographed was a high based well-sculpted “cinnamon swirl” supercell updraft as it tracked along I-80 from Brule to just northwest of North Platte before weakening.  Robn and I stuck with this a little too long, while Matt Crowther and company broke off sooner in favor of new development back toward Julesburg, CO.  Matt’s decision to break off that initial storm paid off, as they managed to get fantastic images of the 2nd supercell that tracked south of Ogallala.  Robin and I caught the last glimpses of the supercell structure just after sunset from a viewing point a couple miles east-southeast of Elsie, NE.  Matt and Scott joined us at this location and we watched a 3rd supercell track basically along the same track as supercell #2.  There was just enough remaining twilight for my Nikon D3 to take advantage of, so I set it up on the tripod and shot continuous 5-second exposures of lightning illuminated structure… beautiful bell-shaped updraft with a wonderful convective top above.  This was just a beautiful sight!!  A very rewarding day on the high plains with the storms essentially to ourselves as all the other chasers targeted much farther east with little in the way of results.

This is very brief with a more detailed account to be written later on next week.  My chase partner Robin Lorenson and I left Salina, KS about 8:45am for a target somewhere around Sidney, NE to Sterling, CO.  We missed the La Grange, Wyoming 25-minute tornado event by about 30 minutes. We were simply late. Other storm chasers had the same fate as I’m finding out (including Bill Hark, who we chewed the fat with for probably too long in retrospect in Sterling!! It was great to catch up with you again though, Bill!).  However many others were not late, who were already up along I-80 in the early afternoon — including Vortex-2.  Some fine High Plains storm photography, though, ensued as we followed the supercell as it evolved over the next several hours from south of Harrisburg to north of Dalton to southwest of Oshkosh by late-evening twilight.  Below are a few images from this chase:

May 25, 2009 Tribune, KS Vicinity Storms & Brief Glimpse of a Non-Supercell Tornado

I decided to chase this day with the hopes of intercepting a non-supercell (landspout) tornado along a nearly stationary north-south surface boundary.  Surface temperature/dewpoints were expected to be in the mid 70s over mid 50s dewpoints in the area of interest which Lamar, CO to Tribune, KS.  I set off from Dodge City at 9:45am (CDT) after a whopping 1.5 hours of sleep following a midnight shift, hopefully arriving in the target area around Noon.  I knew that storms would form very early given a non-existent cap. The trick was to get on storms early in their updraft-dominant phase before evolving more upscale into a more complicated outflow dominant mess.  The first storms of the day developed along a north-south axis from near Burlington to Cheyenne Wells, and I hoped to reach the southern end of this first development near Cheyenne Wells.  I arrived in Cheyenne Wells to a signficantly weakened storm.  I didn’t hang around Cheyenne Wells long before realizing I needed to get back southeast toward newly developing sharp-looking towers — about halfway between Cheyenne Wells and Tribune very near the state border.

I decided to head east on an unpaved, but well graded farm road northeast of Sheridan Lake, CO.  The newly formed updrafts had high bases to the east and northeast.  Eventually the northern one filled in with precipitation, but I continued to trudge east.  I stopped for a short time to photograph the darkening mass off to the northeast with an interesting embedded updraft base feature.  I photographed this with some oil wells in the foreground very near the state border at around or shortly before 2pm CDT.  After this, I continued east on the farm road to get closer to the more southern updraft area of newer cells, but the road became increasingly soft and messy, so I turned around and retreated back west.  I eventually headed back south to Towner, CO and then east on Hwy 96 into Greeley County, KS.  At this point, I was getting increasingly tired and impatient with the disorganization of everything, so I decided to just bag the chase and head back home so I could get some sleep.  Well, as I was writing this off, a new updraft surge was looking rather interesting to my north as I was approaching Tribune.  Sometime between 2:30 and 2:40pm CDT, the updraft base to the north looked rather well organized, and I could make out a fairly well-defined high-based funnel cloud.  It was such a small funnel relative to the distance from the cloud base to the surface that I just simply wrote it off as an insignificant funnel — however the shape persisted for at least a couple minutes.  I was too busy driving to try to get north and closer to the updraft area, so I never stopped to get a photo of this feature.  As it turned out, this was actually a landspout tornado that Greely County sherrif confirmed.  I got a call from Chris Foltz at WFO Goodland seeking confirmation of this event (as he noticed my position on Spotter Network).  I did not confirm a tornado from this feature, but did advise him that I observed what certainly looked to be a legit funnel cloud looking to my north while I was just a few miles west of Tribune.

I finally got north of Tribune and no longer observed this funnel cloud.  The entire storm base was looking more and more uninteresting with time, so I then backtracked into Tribune.  I had thoughts a second time of just heading back home… but then a fairly stout cell formed to my west-southwest, near Sheridan Lake.  This storm had a a 50dbz core on radar up to about 25 thousand feet, which was certainly better than most of the other storms I was observing northwest of Tribune up to that point.  I could also make out a fairly healthy updraft base and pseudo lowered area way off in the distance.  I thought what the hell and decided to head back west on Hwy 96.  I didn’t get any farther than about 7 miles west of Tribune before another newly developed storm took my interest south of Tribune to my east-southeast!  I just decided to sit still there west of Tribune and watch things for awhile.  Storm updraft then began to my northwest at around 3:40pm, and I photographed this for a little bit along Hwy 96.  This new storm formed an interesting “mustache” type outflow cloud structure beneath the base which was somewhat photogenic.  I then headed north on a farm road just to the north side of Horace where I photographed this storm a little bit more.  It was at this point, around 4:15pm CDT, when I met up with the Greeley County sherrif.  He described the earlier tornado event to me and described what he saw as a small funnel, a dust debris area in the field, and nothing in the middle — fitting the classic landspout tornado description.  He said it lasted some 3 or 4 minutes.  After I was done photographing from this location, I finally decided I had enough and began my trek back home.

I reached Garden City at around 6:00pm to a surprisingly well-developed updraft to my east with pretty damn good structure.  Instead of taking Hwy 50 back home, I wanted to follow this storm since it looked so appealing visually from the backside.  This cell behaved like a left-split supercell, moving to the north-northwest during its brief life as a well-organized storm.  I stopped to photograph this updraft a few miles east of Garden City…then decided to get closer to the storm and hopefully either get into some hail or photograph more structure from closer in.  By the time I reached about 10 miles northeast of Garden City, the storm rapidly collapsed between 6:30 and 6:45pm.  After that, I finally make my final leg back home to Dodge City, in time for about an hour and a half more sleep and my next 10pm-6am shift.  All in all, not a fantastic chase photographically speaking, but my forecast verified:  There was, indeed, a landspout tornado, however brief it was, northwest of Tribune.  I just was not in the right position at the time of the event.