High Plains Drifter

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: