High Plains Drifter

This was another one of those spontaneous chases.  I wasn’t exactly planning on chasing today, but I kept the opportunity open given the decent  west-northwest mid and upper level flow pattern combined the increase in 60s dewpoints northwest toward far northwestern Oklahoma.  Since I was due in to work at midnight, I was on a "leash", so I couldn’t really stray too awfully far from Dodge City.  That said, I decided to drive down toward Englewood, leaving around 4:30 or so.  I was just hoping for an isolated storm to form somewhere near Beaver County, OK just to the south and southeast of Liberal.  I was banking on storm motion being southeasterly given the mid level winds.  No storms formed in my target area.  By dumb luck, a storm had formed well to my south around the central Texas Panhandle.  This storm, a left-moving supercell, likely split off from initial convection that developed across the TX panhandle.  The end result was a storm that was moving northeast, instead of southeast.  This was good!  It was basically moving closer to me as I decided to inch farther south and east.  I took some initial photos around the Logan, OK area of the distant storm to my south-southwest.  I drove down to Follett and continued east as the main updraft of this storm was coming more into view. 

Left-moving supercells are somewhat rare and only thrive in environments that have a nearly straight line hodograph.  Usually left moving supercells have a hard northerly component, so storm relative boundary layer winds will have a northerly component to them.  Usually air is more stable the farther north you go unless a left-split storm is isolated and within a large warm, moist sector such that northerly storm relative winds are providing inflow into the storm with ample CAPE.  Well, this happened yesterday, and this supercell was fairly long-lived for a left-moving storm.  It produced a fairly long swath of very large hail of baseball size.  Photographically, this storm was awesome.  It was all by itself against blue sky, and the convection was very crisp with fantastic contrast.  It was exactly the type of storm I look to photograph.  All sorts of color and contrast.  This was the first good supercell I’ve photographed now with my new Nikon D3 + 14-24mm f/2.8 Nikon lens.  I looove that 14mm focal length on a full frame sensor!!  No 1.5 crop factor.  Wow is it wide.  I’m going to love this on my chase trip coming up (more details on that in a blog post soon!).  I followed this highly photogenic left-moving supercell from Gage to Woodward before calling it a chase.  There were moments with this storm where a decent looking wall cloud would develop with modest cloud base rotation (anticyclonic!).  Once I got to Woodward around 8:45pm or so, the storm was beginning to shrivel up croak.  It was excellent timing since I had to start my drive back to Dodge so I could get ready for work at midnight.  Below are a few photos: