A Championship Day (Even if Not for Storms)
High-based Storms in the Nebraska Panhandle
12 June 11
SHORT: From LBL, headed to the BFF area for high-based upslope action. Observed a few such storms from between BFF-AIA.
LONG:
The day wasn’t too spectacular convectively, but we saw storms and had a great time nonetheless.
Morning dawned to the analytic display of foci that were somewhere between muddy, nebulous and vague on the spectrum of precision. The surface map showed that the isodrosothermal field had been mangled by overnight and morning convection over southern Kansas, east of where we spent the night. When all else fails, the terrain just isn’t going anywhere–at least not for the next 20-30 million years or so.
We therefore headed toward the reachable area of the NEb Panhandle/NE CO, figuring that 50s F dew points in that area sometimes do good things as long as deep-layer shear is at least marginal. It also put us in position for day-2. Plus, Elke and I love that area for many nonconvective reasons.
After visiting an abandoned shack in western KS, we found a nice hilltop vantage about 5 SW Angora NEb, listening to assorted birds and photographing wildflowers (e.g., copper mallow, western wallflower, and veiny dock), as we waited for convective eruptions.
Assorted towers and turrets soon bubbled up to the W and SW. One persistent pile to our W evolved into a short-lived, high-based storm with a wall cloud to our NW, viewed across the rippled orographic musculature of the Nebraska Panhandle’s ash-bed grasslands. The storm exhibited weak cyclonic shear in the midlevels based on radar velocity output, but just for a few scans.
Other, smaller, junkier cells fired along the foothills in SE WY and over the western reaches of the Wildcat Hills to our SW, amounting to little except as a scenic diversion for aviators. We saw several contrails weaving between storms, including this scene over Minatare. The storms died off with the setting sun.
We settled into a charming little mom-n-pop motel in BFF with funky walls made of green quartzite from Utah. This also was the memorable night my hometown Dallas Mavericks won the NBA championship too–making up for a disappointing evening 5 years before in GCK when I watched them lose it to the very same team.
A very fine day, indeed…
Software Change for the BLOG
We interrupt this BLOG for an important announcement. Had this been an actual emergency, you wouldn’t give a flip. But since you’re reading this, here goes…
After several problems with security, poor SPAM filtering for comments and track-backs, slow performance, and general user unfriendliness on my end, we finally flushed Movable Type and switched the entire BLOG to Word-Press.
This includes all the previous entries and underlying database. Word-Press has a different file naming convention, which rendered all links to previous entries invalid. Elke, bless her heart, had to go through and update the links one-by-one, since that didn’t happen automatically. Still, if you happen across an unresponsive link to another BLOG entry, let us know and we’ll fix that.
As for comments, those had been disabled for a long time in MT due to an avalanche of SPAM that MT seemed utterly powerless to restrict. Somewhat regretfully, the only way to exterminate the infestation of digital vermin was to ban all new comments. I may try to open comments for the 2008 chases for awhile and see what happens; so if there’s a chase day for which you want to compare notes, look it up here and comment if possible.
Check out the cool things that happen when you click on a photo link. The image appears in a window that allows forward/backward sequential viewing of the chase day’s slide show. Just run your cursor over the right or left side of a photo and a forward or backward arrow will appear, on which you can click to go backward or forward in that day’s selection of chase photos.
We’re also considering some relatively unobtrusive web ads (at the bottom of the BLOG page) to offset the costs in overhead, as long as I have power of pre-approval over any advertising content. It’s not a done deal, so we shall see…