For me, this was just an “average” chase. I intercepted two supercell thunderstorms on this day after leaving Dodge City shortly after Noon. My target was Kingman, KS, but I never got there before storms started forming. I was already in “chase mode” when I reached Pratt, as the first decent storm echo on radar was developing to my south-southeast. It was really early in the day, so I just opted to let the storm come up to me on Highway 54 at Kingman. From Kingman, I followed the storm… a rather smallish LP or “dry classic” type storm… north-northeast from Cheney Lake up to Highway 50 near Burrton. This was indeed a “race chase” as this storm was trucking north-northeast at around 50 mph. This left me very little time to photograph the storm other than brief stops for a quick snap. A lot of my images of this storm were shot while driving up north on the paved road from Cheney dam to Haven. A large wall cloud formed briefly, with a beautiful rear-flank downdraft clear slot eventually taking shape to my north-northwest near Haven. These were probably my best images of the chase day.
Once the storm reached Highway 50 it became less organized and was just continuing to truck away from me so I said to hell with that storm. I then drove east to Newton, and with a new focus down along the Oklahoma border, I made a goal to get down toward the Winfield area. A fairly impressive supercell emerged out of a cluster of storms southwest of South Haven. An extrapolated path took this storm to South Haven about 15 to 20 minutes before I was expected to reach the South Haven interchange. When I first got a good glance of the structure of the storm, I realized that it was likely not going to produce any large, photogenic tornadoes, so I went into “structure mode” — basically getting far to the east of the storm to get decent supercell structure shots. The structure of the storm was pretty good while I was on Hwy 166 looking back to the west and southwest…with a very long, broad inflow band taking shape from the north through northwest feeding into the main updraft area. It just looked like there was too much rain-cooled air being re-ingested into the updraft area…however given such strong storm-relative inflow winds, rain-cooled outflow could not surge very far from the updraft area. So what ended up happening, from my observations, was that you would end up with nice looking wall clouds for a few minutes — only to evolve into crappy looking fragmented pseudo miniature shelf-cloud looking features.
The best of these wall cloud features I photographed was along Highway 166 at about 4:56pm CDT looking west from a location ~ 2 to 3 miles west of Arkansas City. Very briefly, before I had my camera in hand of course, there was what appeared to be a bulbous looking laminar appearance protruding from the wall cloud about halfway to the surface. I tried to get a photo of this, but was just a little too late. This would have been almost directly in line with Highway 166, or barely south — not too far from Ashton. Anyway, after this, the wall cloud became fragmented with outflow seemingly winning out for that feature. I continued into Ark City and then eventually north on County Road 1 about 7 or 8 miles east of Ark City. The structure was never really the same as it was back farther west…and the whole thing was just becoming a big mess — and not very photogenic. Nevertheless, I captured a few images as the storm’s core was approaching my location shortly before reaching Hwy 160 east of Winfield. Not long after this, I gave up on this storm given the yucky structure and it moving farther east toward southeast KS. I’ve never had luck photographing a storm in southeast Kansas, so I figured this storm’s structure would continue to degrade. I drove back to Winfield and got some dinner at the Mexican restaurant in town. After this, I headed south a bit to photograph backside Cumulonimbus development of storms coming up from far northern Oklahoma with only marginal success. I called it a chase right at sunset and began my trek back to Dodge City. All in all, not too bad of a chase. I’ve had much better — and much worse chases — that’s for sure.
