High Plains Drifter

Jay, Stacie, and I left Lawrence around 1pm and headed for a target area around the Hutchinson-Newton vicinity. We met back up with Rob, Mitch, and Jon in South Hutchinson at a roadside historical marker at the intersection of Hwy 96 and 50… where we awaited convective development in our target area for quite awhile. A large multicell complex of storms had developed well to our south near Alva, OK which was about 80 miles from us. We decided to forego this in hopes of development closer to our west.

After becoming increasingly impatient, we decided to drop south as the towering Cu to our immediate west and northwest just weren’t doing much. We intercepted a small complex of three storms in northeastern Pratt County, two of which were right-left split members that broke off before we got to the area. The left split which was moving just west of due north…was the healthiest of the three. We headed north through Langdon after we drove south about 20 miles…then back west. The storms just weren’t all that photogenic as observed from the east. We decided to get west of the storms and shoot the backside of them as sunset approached.

The left split soon died, but we were rewarded from our decision to move west…as the sky from north through east through south was very photogenic with beautiful mammatus and a golden wheat foreground. This is why I love Kansas! I had a very unique sunlight ray phenomenon (called an anticrepuscular ray) that lit up the eastern horizon in a vertical triangular column. It was extremely impressive and I was fortunate enough to capture this with nice foreground.

After hanging around here along Hwy 50 in Stafford County, we decided to continue west back to Dodge City. A new storm was developing just west of us which began to take on beautiful colored structure. The colors were just incredible! I couldn’t believe it.

We stopped again to photograph this little storm… then headed west some more before stopping one more time to photograph the Cumulonimbus looking back to the east after sunset as these new storms were becoming better organized.

This morning, Day 8, we are in Dodge City. Stacie’s last day was yesterday, so she had to begin here drive back to Fort Worth this morning. Jon, Rob, and Mitch are at the Super 8 here in Dodge and Jay’s here at my place… It’s been storming here in Dodge since about 5 am. A lot of rain and thunderstorms in western Kansas this morning.

It’s still unclear where we’ll be heading today. I’m liking Southeast Colorado upslope by early this evening. This is subject to change, however.

Jay, Stacie, and I are currently on I-29 heading south between Fargo and Aberdeen at this time. Jon, Rob, and Mitch are behind us about 10-15 miles. Day 6… what a day of decisions. We left Bismarck with a target of south-central SD in mind. We drove about 30-40 miles and Jon Finch called asking if we were chasing the Devils Lake, ND area today. I told him no, because we needed to get south for logistical reasons. After Jon called, we actually started interrogating this area for a kicks and giggles. It looked really, really good to us. We were trying to figure out why we would want to blow off a very convergent low center area with upper 60s dewpoints and nice southeast to east southeast winds…along with an outflow boundary. After talking this possibility over with Rob, Mitch, and Jon, all 6 of us decided that we couldn’t resist this area. It was actually the closest target to our location at that time.

We turned around before we got to SD back north on US83 — target of Devils Lake. The ob was persistently very good at Devils lake in the mid 80s with upper 60s dewpoints and a southeast to east southeast wind. The only thing that had us worried… and was quite risky…was the lack of upper level flow and the proximity to the Canada border. Storms would be moving with a pretty decent northerly component.

After a lunch in Devils Lake, we hung around at the shore of Devils Lake awaiting initiation of storms. A small storm did eventually develop… leading to a fairly picturesque LP supercell near Cando. As this storm developed, however, the old outflow boundary was pushing back to the south into our area with northeast winds and stable air. This killed any possibility of tornadoes. The base on our storm was high to begin with. This storm eventually suffered a quick death given its small overall size. Other similar storms tried to go up southeast of this original storm, but failed. The outflow boundary was just too much for this area. It didn’t simmer enough north of the boundary, and this was a significant failure component.

So, we ran into Tim Samaras, Joe Golden, Carl Young, and company before we got to I-29 about 17 miles south of the international border; sharing the laments of the pitiful 2006 chase season up to this point. It’s always fun to run in to other chaser friends at various points during the trip.

[~2.5 hrs later...]

I-29 now exit 114 South Dakota. It was 83 degrees a few minutes ago and quite windy at that last pit stop… we may have had a bit of a heat burst from some dying storms, I guess. We noticed lightning to the southwest about an hour earlier which had diminished. Listening to Art Bell right now; it’s helping keep Jay going

Here’s a photo of the LP marginal supercell from yesterday’s chase near Cando:

Now here’s an interesting photograph. Jon’s car is an essential feeding frenzy for a large conglomeration of flies, bees, and other small flying critters. A gourmet of an assortment of splattered dead bugs attracted all these flies and bees… yeah, rather unpleasant, but had to document this feeding frenzy:

For Day 7 (Monday 5/29) we are targetting the tail-end of the front where a pseudo-triple point of sorts may set up in south-central KS. This target will be on the edge of moderate 500-250mb flow, but CAPE should be high and convergence appears to be strong enough according to the NAM model to get a storm to go up… although it may be late. If not, then we just drive back to Dodge for the night, so Stacie can begin her trek back to Fort Worth. Dodge City appears to be a good location to setup for Tuesday’s chase from western OK to northeastern NM. More later from this kamikaze drive, perhaps!

A much better chase day on May 27th in North Dakota!  We intercepted storms northeast of Bismarck, one of which becoming a meaty supercell between Wing and Regan.  The structure on this supercell was quite nice.  We followed this north until it weakened, and as it shriveled up, there was visible rotation at cloud base…with even a nascent funnel it appeared looking WSW towards the shrinking updraft area near the Florence Lake NWR.  At Denhoff we travelled west to catch the backside of these storms.  We almost drove into a 72 VIL core (golfball hail or larger), but thanks to a timely radar update, we obviously reconsidered going south on Hwy 41 at Mercer… and optioned farther west dropping south on 200 Alternate to Washburn.  The backside of the supercells were very photogenic with just incredible deep saturated colors of pink, violet, blue, orage… you name it.  It was stunning color contrast right at sunset.  We ran into very brief quarter size hail just northwest of Wilton then decided to stop off at the intersection of Hwy 83 and Hwy 36 to photograph lightning from the southern most supercell that was over Mandan-Bismarck.

We are in Bismarck this morning and plan to leave here probably around 10am for a target near the SD-NE line west or northwest of Valentine, NE?

I’ll try and make this brief, since I need to do a forecast for today’s chase. We are in Dickinson, ND this Saturday morning. We left Gillette, WY yesterday afternoon and followed high based, non-severe storms from the Belle Fourche area north to near the North Dakota state border south of Dickinson. There just wasn’t enough moisture to sustain good, organized severe storms/supercells. It was pretty much a bust, for I thought we’d at least see a picturesque supercell. Oh well. My website is currently having some issues, and I’m lucky to get this blog update out, if I can. I’ll try and post pictures soon if the site can come back alive.

Today (Day 5), we are targetting an area between here and Bismarck it appears. The RUC breaks out storms in this area along a stationary front extending southwest to northeast across ND… from a deep surface low over Wyoming. Unclear what kind of storms we’ll be dealing with, but there’ll be higher CAPE today.

Here are some photos from yesterday’s chase:

Jay, Stacie, and I targetted the area around Phillipsburg by mid-late afternoon where surface convergence appeared to be maximized. We tried to stay as far south as we could as it appeared most of Nebraska would erupt in too many storms. It turns out that indeed happened. The problem was, storms in our target area were developing out ahead of the boundary layer convergence or the remnant Pacific cold front itself. We monitored trends in radar and the sky, and it just wasn’t clear which storm was the best to intercept. Finally, around the town of Guide Rock, we stopped to let the atmosphere hopefully straighten itself out in hopes that a coherent severe storm could evolve.

We watched a small storm approach us from the southwest near Guide Rock both visually and on radar, which had up to 65 VIL at times. As the storm got closer, we could hear a faint hail roar. We continued east about 5 to 7 more miles to stay ahead of this marginally severe storm. We stopped a couple times east of Guide Rock to photograph the structure of the updraft of this storm, which was somewhat respectable. It appeared marginally supercellular-ish when it was between Guide Rock and Nelson…to the southeast of the main developing SVR line forming on the cold front. We went north on Hwy 14 and our storm became worse looking visually. We met up with Matt Crowther and Jim Leonard north of Nelson and continued east on Hwy 4.

The rest of the chase just sucked.. at least for me. Storms on the cold front began to get much better organized to our west-northwest. We decided to hang out for awhile at this location on Hwy 4 somewhere not too far west of Davenport. The light was getting low, so I decided to set the tripod up for photography. Inflow winds were gusting to about 30-40mph from the southeast… which was promising! I left my tripiod un-attended for about 20 to 30 seconds or so out of reach. You can guess what happened next. I don’t have my heavy duty Manfrotto tripod with me, but more of a lighter-weight landscape photographer’s tripod legs. Anyway, the tripod fell forward, lens-first onto the gravel road. I completely busted my 18-70mm lens. The body is okay, though thankfully. So that was about a $300 lapse in judgement not paying attention with very strong winds. It’s a good thing we are in a fairly decent sized city (and I have some supplemental cash) so I can replace this lens right away. I missed out on some decent low light structure shots as we were driving north on Hwy 81 in Southern Fillmore County…. oh well. It’s only Day 1….

Today: We had talked about chasing southeast KS last night… or at least considered the option… it’s not even 8am yet as of this time. We may blow off today, like we had originally thought and head west (after I buy my new lens) towards western Nebraska. The NAM and GFS are now throwing a bit of a curve ball at us with regards to Friday and Saturday… it’s showing more of a "dirty ridge" scenario now across the central High Plains… where enough flow could cut underneath into western KS to make things just interesting enough. Both the NAM and GFS develop storms just north of the thermal low somewhere in Northern KS on Friday. I think by heading into western Nebraska… like Scottsbluff or something… we can keep this option open… because it still isn’t exactly clear.