High Plains Drifter

I was able to leave work right at 4pm for yesterday’s chase. As Iposted in the FCST thread, the area I was most interested in was alongand north of US-24 to Nebraska. I met up with Tony Laubach and VerneCarlson for a short time east of Ness City as some cumulus weresomewhat intriguing at the nose of a small scale mixed-out warm plumewhere convergence was locally maximized. I told myself that if the Cudidn’t look any better in 45 minutes, I would bolt northwest where Iwas extremely confident there would be a sustained surface based severestorm where the deep tropospheric forcing was much better acrossNorthwest KS. The first storms were developing with some decent echoesaloft around Goodland, and at that point, I continued north toWakeeney, then northwest to Hoxie, to my first stopping point south ofRexford. The southern storm had some nice shape to it and appeared tobe supercellular, but it was small. Of interest at the time was alarger mass of convective updraft due north. These two storms mergednorthwest of Rexford, and the storm really took off. Of course, it wasgetting well into the evening by this point, but the supercellstructure was quite fine…although high based. The westernmost portionof the storm revealed an interesting lowered feature, which I guess youcould call a wall cloud, but there was a lot of outflow dust beneath itlooking roughly west from near Hwy 23-83 junction at Seldon. It was toodark for handheld photography, so I tried my best to get the tripodsetup for some 1-3 second wide angle exposures amidst strong eastinflow winds and blowing dust.

Now,idiot me, I continued east on Hwy 9, instead of joining the massesheading south on 23. I guess I was expecting the storm to move more dueeast…and from my perspective due east of the storm, the structure waspretty good from a photography standpoint. I stopped briefly about 6 WNew Almelo for more long-exposure photography on the tripod before Ibegan to get pelted by quarter-size hail. Looking to thewest-southwest, the supercell structure looked pretty darn good fromthis vantage point on Highway 9, so the decision to head east insteadof south I guess wasn’t so bad after all. Of course, by the time I gotfar enough east to reach a south option again at Hwy 283, it was dark,and there was little if any decent lightning illuminated structure. Ireached Hill City amidst blaring tornado sirens, continuing southhopefully far enough south to get out of the cloud canopy so I can geta nice distant view of supercell structure. It really wasn’t to be. Idid stop at a high spot south of Hill City where other spotters andchasers also stopped, but by this time, the supercell circulation waseast of Hill City. There were a lot of lightning illuminated "hangydownies" just west of where the radar had strongest rotation near HillCity. There was nothing more to shoot of interest photography wise, soI headed south towards Wakeeney in hopes that maybe a very distant viewof the storm could be interesting, but even that wasn’t all that wascracked up to be, so I continued to Wakeeney, ate dinner, and headedhome. A fun little chase. Below are a few images (all 12mm wide angle):