High Plains Drifter

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!!