Last Chance near Last Chance
Wiggins to Cope CO
23 Jun 13
SHORT: Remained ahead of northeast CO convection as it metamorphosed from early, fuzzy slop near Hoyt and Wiggins to a supercell-infused squall line between Woodrow and Cope with several photogenic and beautiful scenes.
LONG:
Final chase days of the season usually are known in advance to us, because we tend to take our Great Plains trips near the end of the traditional spring storm-observing season in a fixed time slot. As such, many last-chance chase days are known as such that morning, if not before. They can get sentimental. We focus and reflect on the possibilities with a renewed sense of wonder and anticipation, knowing this is the final opportunity for the season and probably the year (save the opportunistic fall chase that happens once every five years or so).
Northeastern Colorado was the target area, with the old outflow boundary from the previous day’s convection in WY and NEb having settled southward into eastern CO and weakened, leaving behind some upslope flow into the Front Range, reduced low-level moisture compared to the previous day in WY, and weaker (but still sufficient) shear for supercells. Cloud bases were likely to be high, with strong potential for outflow dominance and meager, conditional tornado risk.
Yet these reduced-moisture, upslope-flow days often yield scenic skyscapes festooned with interesting storm clouds of various types–especially if one is patient with often ragged, nebulous early convection and keeps apace until it organizes. Forecast storm motion toward the CO/KS border area also likely would take us toward I-70 and a one-day drive home the following day.
Our weather-dictated itinerary the previous several days had taken us from MT-ND-SD-WY-NEb, where we were starting the morning in Kimball, right by the CO border. It was as if a storm-intercept guide had been navigating us gradually homeward with amazing skies and fantastic experiences all along the journey. How fortunate! And here we were, ready to partake of one more afternoon of beautiful storms on the way home.
Proximity to the target area allowed plenty of time to eat brunch, analyze data, and watch the southwestern horizons. Early-afternoon towers erupting to our SW, in northern CO, were easy to see from IBM, so we cruised easily S to Ft. Morgan and saw the high, fuzzy bases even from there. Continuing SW through Wiggins toward Hoyt, we got a nice close-up view of the virga factories, appreciating the majesty of the High Plains even under soft storms, on scales large and small. Small? Oh yes. We enjoyed watching birds that Elke couldn’t identify hop through the stubbled cornfields of 2012, skittering along at a deliberate clip, pecking away at bugs, seeds, or other material unseen.
Next, we retraced the path back up to Ft. Morgan, then veered southward to get on proper road options that would allow us to stay ahead of whatever would evolve from the growing multicell complex to our W. While doing so, the convection slowly acquired visible, if still high, updraft bases, which gradually grew in areal extent and number along with CG flashes. I’ve seen this before. Usually, in these favorable deep-shear profiles, a supercell will develop unless the entire mass is blasted asunder in infancy by cold outflow. That wasn’t happening; the cores offered only feeble density currents, judging by the lack of proximal dust plumes.
Jaunting off the main highway between Brush and Woodrow, a couple miles down a dead-end dirt road, we found a good place right at the terminus where we could photograph wild sunflowers and a wild storm. Cores grew. Updrafts grew in front of the cores. Inflow strengthened. The whole raggedly beautiful storm pile got better-organized and backbuilt before our very eyes, ears and nostrils, as revealed during a stop just S of Woodrow.
East on US-36 4 miles out of Last Chance, and another mile N on a (barely) paved side road, led us to temporary solitude: us, a photogenic abandoned farmstead and the rampart of storms in the west. Whoa! What’s that back there to the NW behind the old house? You guessed it, brother–not just an old storage building, but a high-based wall cloud and mesocyclone.
Although short-lived, the line-embedded supercell provided some striking, picturesque scenery as it headed ENE, before getting disorganized in favor of other updrafts to our own W and SW. While watching that spectacle, a ranch mom and her kids drove up on an ATV to make sure we were OK; we chatted with them awhile before one of the little ones drove them all back to their house on the four-wheeler. Encroaching storms sent us eastward to the Anton area.
Even though the whole complex was becoming increasingly outflow-dominant in the fading daylight, a marvelous episode of deep twilight blues, slate to marine in hue, sandwiched layers of laminar cloud material to the SW…to the N…to the SW again. What a show! At least transiently intense, somewhat supercellular updrafts kept forming along its leading edge, with assorted notches (some rather sparkly!) and other circulations of varying scales.
Admiring the scene, we also noticed that the base surfing outflow to our SW was becoming increasingly circular, quickly. Within less than 30 seconds, and about a mile away (closer than it appears in this wide-angle shot), a small but tightly rotating wall cloud formed from a pre-existing, seemingly benign lowering under that base (annotated version). Quickly, dust stopped then rose beneath. The circulation started to hook toward its NE–right at us. What had been light westerly (but mild) outflow winds backed and accelerated from the ESE. Time to bail out of there!
Although I doubted any substantial tornado could develop in this circumstance, I didn’t want to be the guinea pig to test that hypothesis. Even though we only had to go less than 1/4 mile to get back on US-36 and gun it eastward, we still were not comfortably relaxed–no thoughts of rocking in hammocks beneath Caribbean tiki huts while sipping dewy beverages. Instead, the rising pile of dust, under a small area of cloud-base rotation, with screaming inflow winds, nearly overtook us. I can’t say for certain if that circulation ever tightened into a full-fledged tornado, but if not, it came precariously close.
Just as fast as it formed, deeper outflow from the west crashed through the feature and tore it up, leaving behind a dispersive dust pall over the highway behind us as we gained a few miles of headway. With daylight fading fast and eyelids growing heavier, we watched the mess become more linear and turned S toward I-70, out of the way of all storms. A night at our favorite motel in ITR, lightning flickering off to the N and NE, closed out our 2014 storm-intercept season with a lullaby after the atmosphere’s final flourish.
Driving home the next day, we reflected and remembered. What a season it was…rewarding for us photographically, educationally and spiritually through the unfailingly transcendent experience of wonder and awe before storm-tossed Great Plains skies. The sting of major missed tornado events practically in our backyard was healed during over half an hour of observing from one spot a nearly stationary, violent, yet ultimately harmless tornado in open country of northern Kansas. We made some great memories amidst the solitude of the prairies from North Texas to central Montana. With heavy hearts, we also thought of old friends killed just over three weeks prior by the vaporous forms we seek, on a day when we didn’t head out. Here’s to a safer and much less destructive, yet more photogenic and inspiring, 2014 storm season to come.
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Our PING trail for this day. [PING date is ending date in UTC.]
Buried Tornadoes by the Border
Chugwater WY to Kimball NE
22 Jun 13
SHORT: Intercepted 2 supercells in SE WY, first photogenic, second became dark and nasty HP with about two tornadoes buried inside and barely/intermittently visible. Lightning and photogenic outflow formations with tail end of resulting MCS in NEb Panhandle.
LONG:
Having made a full-circle back to Chadron from five days before, we did a little late-morning photography of abandoned antique vehicles that we had seen previously, then bid farewell to our favorite north-central High Plains town to head SW. We targeted as promising of an upslope-flow supercell scenario in southeastern WY as you’ll ever see, realistically. The previous day’s boundary was shunted southward toward the Cheyenne ridge, flow behind it veering throughout the day to both advect unusually rich low-level moisture upslope (beneath favorably strong midlevel winds) and yield a big hodograph. That moist air rising up the Laramies would do the heavy lifting, with help from hours of sunshine. Since we actually weren’t far away and were leaving before noon, I was as confident in seeing a tornadic storm on this day as any the entire June trip. Slap those hands together, fill the tank, hit the road, and get ready to rumble under some spinning sky.
Supercells rolling off the Laramie Mountains under similar flow patterns and even less moisture have produced delicious tornadoes on several occasions in the last 15 years. For some reason, we (and I, before marrying Elke) had been late to the party for most of them, either missing the tubes or barely catching their end stages. The 2010 Chugwater storm was, of course, a wonderful exception. Even early initiation wouldn’t be a problem, given the long N-S roads of eastern WY and the good visibility away from the E slopes of the escarpment between Hawk Springs and Chugwater.
Over the hills and into Wyoming we went, fueling in Lusk under the midday sun as anvils began streaming off the northern limb of the Laramies. This was early initiation indeed…for which (for once) we were ready! The most vigorous cell, near Dwyer, appeared to be turning right and organizing into a supercell fairly quickly. Fortunately, it was aiming right down US-26 toward the Lingle area, where getting ahead of it would be easy. No wondering what was over the horizon, no driving 150 miles after an early-forming Wyoming storm already in progress! When we got just S of Lingle, there it was, in youthful supercellular splendor, to our W.
The supercell traveled ESE as another developed to its SW, with rain from the newer storm cascading into the established supercell‘s upshear region. After briefly encountering fellow storm observers Vince Miller and Matt Crowther, we moved a few miles S, stopping briefly to watch a beautiful phase of the otherwise shrinking and rising cloud-base configuration, characterized by a clear slot with tightening rotation. Nothing came of that; the occlusion downdraft cut too tightly into the rotation area and dry entrainment eroded what was left. The older cell then slowly weakened at the expense of the rapidly strengthening upshear storm, and we headed S toward Veteran to get in front of the latter.
What we found there was an entirely new animal–one that would turn into a menacing, growling, teeth-baring, attacking beast in short order. Looking SW at the reasonably large updraft area, ragged, slowly rotating shelf/wall cloud hybrid and dense core, it was easy to predict that this beautiful mess of a storm would become an HP in short order. Since the entire storm was moving ESE, this was an unsustainable viewing position; the forward-flank core and its hail would impose its will on us if we stayed put much longer.
A quick zigzag E and S out of the Veteran/Yoder area took us onto US-85 NE of Hawk Springs and NNE of LaGrange. We had to bolt S ahead of the strengthening mesocyclone to our SW in order to take the east option toward WY-151/NEb-88. First, however, we had a few minutes to stop, observe and admire a very rapidly intensifying circulation–a photogenic and menacing wall cloud that quickly evolved into wide, rapidly rotating, nearly ground-scraping bowl, a mesocyclone that clearly meant serious business. A small funnel briefly whizzed around the left (SE) side of the bowl, but with no clearly discernible debris beneath. The entire spinning mass of gas still was moving ESE and we were NE of it. No time to tarry…we had to go!
We skirted the E edge of the orbiting precip curtains from N-S as the mesocyclone quickly wrapped in rain and the storm took on a mean, nasty HP form. I’m used to tangling with those in north TX, but not on the more road-sparse plains of the WY-NEb border. Fortunately the east-151/88 option was conveniently located to offer a chance to get safely ahead of the whirling dervish for awhile, albeit in the eventual path. A brief glance at radar indicated a rapidly tightening and potentially tornadic mesocyclone to our NW as we approached the border. I stopped there to observe and thought I might have seen the tornado (see photos in table below), one about which I was more certain that night, after viewing the photos via camera display and talking with the NWS office. Given its S of E movement, we couldn’t stay too long.
After charging E across the border, after a mesocyclonic cycle, and while I still was driving to gain some distance, Elke took a look at the radar display and saw this rather alarming SRM signature a few miles to our NW. There was obviously another tornado somewhere in that dark precip mass–and likely a significant, potentially violent vortex to boot! It also was moving ESE, meaning we would have to stair-step along the W-E highway in multiple stops to stay safely ahead of it, and of the wrapping precip.
Needless to say, I slowed down really quickly and turned into a northward-directed side road to stare hard into the rotating cylinder of precip. At times, during the second of two different stops along NEb-88, I could make out the tornado ‘s condensation funnel–briefly, barely but confidently. We stopped again after turning S on NE-71 past Harrisburg.
What follows is a chronological table of links to a selection of photos taken at the stops, looking NW at first, then WNW. The photos show the region as it looked with eyeballs (“PHOTO”), heavily enhanced (“ENHCD”) and in a few cases, enhanced and annotated (“ANNOT”) to bring out the tornado where possible, and to illustrate the motion. Curved arrows on some ANNOT images show the area of very intense rotation. All of these were processed within a few weeks after returning and provided to the CYS WFO for their evaluation. [I have them prelim track and time estimates the same night via phone call using adjusted camera times (camera was 4 minutes fast).]
[Please scroll down to see the tornado-photo table and the rest of the post. I don’t know how to fix this gap.]
|
Sequence Number & Viewing Location
|
Normal and Edited Photos
| |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. 2 W WY/NE Border, WY-151 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | |
| 2. 2 W WY/NE Border, WY-151 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | |
| 3. 2 W WY/NE Border, WY-151 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | |
| 4. 3 E Stegall S Rd on NE-88 | PHOTO | NO ENHCD | NO ANNOT | |
| 5. 3 E Stegall S Rd on NE-88 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | |
| 6. 3 E Stegall S Rd on NE-88 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | |
| 7. 3 E Stegall S Rd on NE-88 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | |
| 8. 3 E Stegall S Rd on NE-88 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | 9. 3 E Stegall S Rd on NE-88 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT | 10. 4 NE Harrisburg on NE-71 | PHOTO | ENHCD | ANNOT |
Because the tornado on the Wyoming side of the border (images 1-3) appeared to shrink and get deeply occluded into the precip, and because NWS CYS surveyed a distinct tornado track on the Nebraska side, I now very strongly believe (>95% certainty) that the Wyoming and Nebraska tornadoes were separate. On the Nebraska side–yes, there also was another dark, columnar area to the left (SW or WSW) of the tornado cyclone in a few images (mainly 4-5), but I could not tell what it was. The rotation of precip around the tornado in each photo was furious and obvious. Even when I couldn’t see the tornado at all (which was most of the time), there was no doubt of its presence.
Due to lack of visual continuity, I also can not state definitively if the Nebraska tornado was continuous between stops, or two separate events. NWS surveys indicated one path in Nebraska, so I’ll count this as a single, second tornado for now, given no firm evidence to the contrary. The tornado only hit a few things, earning an EF1 rating due to sparse/weak damage indicators. However, its WSR-88D radar signature is consistent with many strong to violent (EF3-4) events, based on a study underway by Bryan Smith and others at SPC. We’ll never know its true strength.
The tornado moved almost directly toward my position in image 9, but dissipated before it got to NE-71. By that time, we had bailed S, out of the way, and found a hilltop S of the 71/88 intersection. There, we tried to view the deeply occluded, embedded meso as it got thrust back out of the rear side of the precip area (enhanced. There may have been a weak tornadic (or nearly tornadic) circulation still going at that point (enhanced), as visible cloud-base rotation still was reasonably strong. I can’t say with complete certainty. By this time, a big gust front and shelf cloud had surged well ahead of the mesocyclone. The supercell was evolving into a linear structure with more storms erupting to the SW–we had an MCS and QLCS on our hands.
Plenty of daylight remained, so…time to go tail-chasing! We proceeded S to and past Kimball in search of a vantage, and found one 3 SSW of town on County road 28, right along the N side of Kimball airport (IBM). This was a treat! Even though the complex was decidedly outflow-dominant at this stage, its arcus underside and photogenic lightning were just plain fun to observe. The core passing to our N fired a good volume of electrical artillery from the same general area (including one whose most visible segment was “questionable”). One bright outlier, an outflow-influenced channel and a few other strikes followed as the core moved E. Meanwhile, the arcus’ underbelly passed overhead and to the S with fantastic sharpness to its turbulent texturing. What a crazy, interesting sky!
Ravenously hungry by now, and chilling uncomfortably from all the outflow, we snapped the shutters at a few more strikes from the last passing core, then headed into town for dinner. Amidst that huge and expansive puddle of outflow, we didn’t imagine that an updraft would blossom to the E that was surface-based, and produce a brief tornado (seen by a few observers still afield) before being undercut. That’s how it goes sometimes. While somewhat disappointed, we could live with it. We had seen some serious tornadic action already, and the hot pizza tasted mighty good going down. Here was one final look at the back side of the complex from the pizza-parlor’s parking lot, as the storms retreated into the suppertime sky.
After checking into the motel in Kimball, I got the tornado time/track info to the CYS WFO to the best extent possible, then reflected back upon another long but very rewarding chase day–one fruitful both photographically and in terms of both tornadic and nontornadic storm experiences. Forecast guidance also indicated that we had one more day of decent storm potential in CO before we had to head home. Our time in Montana was growing ever farther away in the rear-view.
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Our PING trail for this day. [PING date is ending date in UTC.]
Bennington Tornado
Bennington KS
28 May 13
High Plains Therapy, Day 5 of 5
SHORT: Absolutely amazing chase day, top-5 all-time quality. After a very leisurely and relaxing morning on cool side of boundary, and long lunch, intercepted stationary supercell with two tornadoes near Bennington KS. Observed violent and often large tornado from one spot for over 1/2 hour as it underwent multiple shape changes and precip wrappings/unwrappings to our W.
LONG:
Background
Fans of “The Matrix” will get this. Pretend you are Morpheus and I must select from five pills instead of two. You ask me, “What if I told you that you would be presented with five violent-tornado days in Kansas and Oklahoma this season? On one of these days you will be at work. On three others you will chase but see no tornadoes. Only on the remaining single day will you see the event…but you get to choose which. ”
YELLOW PILL: Photogenic sunset tornado in western Kansas and one or two others from same storm, with other messy storms nearby.
PURPLE PILL: Two raging, roaring beasts in the central Oklahoma Crosstimbers with occasional, briefly unobstructed but amazing views; sucker storms in Kansas.
BLUE PILL: One photogenic tornado, but it’s yet another deadly, horrible monster in Moore. A ghastly and unwelcome event, for sure.
GREEN PILL: Mostly very visible, sometimes rain-wrapped brute, nearly stationary for 45 minutes, at times audible; if you want, you could put out camp chairs and coolers, and have a five-course tailgate picnic while observing safely.
RED PILL: Huge, diffuse, erratically moving/expanding and highly dangerous mess that kills respected friends, nearly takes several others, and makes everyone you know profoundly saddened.
Immediately, the red pill is tossed, followed by blue. After careful consideration…
This was the day of the green pill.
Words cannot express how glad I am, several months later, to be able to say that–as frustrating as the yellow, purple and blue days (18-20 May) were at the time. The red day, I was at work and damned glad of it; I am quite satisfied to have been on the evening shift instead of tangling with El Reno’s tornadic phase.
Decisions and leisure
Before going to sleep the night before, in Smith Center, KS, I knew I had just one chase day left before having to return home for an evening shift on the 29th. Already seeing supercell potential for the 28th in two main areas–upslope flow with large hodographs but high cloud bases (eastern CO) and big hodographs, with low LCLs and high moisture along a boundary (in central to northeastern KS)–the choice from Smith Center was pretty easy. As much of a “structure guy” as I can be sometimes, this day I’d have to go for the conditional but potentially juicy tornado threat that was mostly on the way back to Norman. “If it stays capped, at least it’s just a few short hours home.”
Perusal of morning data and short-term progs confirmed that a front was stalling ENE-WSW across KS, obliquely intersecting a dryline that would mix E to somewhere not far W of SLN by mid-afternoon. Low-level winds and mass convergence weren’t particularly strong, but would improve through the afternoon as absolute and differential heating (lots of low clouds N of the front) augmented boundary-based left. The target was obvious–the SLN area or a tad north–only a couple of hours away, with at least 6-7 hours to get there. I liked that news.
Being north of the front, in cool air shaded by low stratus, I wasn’t in any hurry to bake under the high, midday, warm-sector sun of late May. Instead I pulled off a couple of times between Smith Center and Luray simply to open the windows, recline way back, and sit in quiet solitude: just me, the cool breeze, the green, undulating prairie, and songs of birds. So relaxing was one such stop that I actually dozed a little. There’s nothing like a stereophonic meadowlark lullaby to soothe the soul and cleanse the mind.
By the time I hit Luray, the stratus had become stratocu and was breaking into scuddy rags. As I fueled there, Tony Laubach (who was headed from SLN to Colorado) posted a message informing me of a horrendously long traffic backup along eastbound I-70 south of me, and W of SLN, and advised alternate routes. Grateful for the advice, I went down K-18 toward Lincoln, generally aiming for the Bennington area near US-81.
Still with plenty of time to kill, I had a long lunch in Lincoln, nibbling away on an Italian sandwich and salad buffet at Pizza Hut while checking obs, and also, checking in with the progress of my chase caravan partners. By this time, I was glad to be indoors; the boundary was nearly overhead, and temps were getting warm as the sun beat down outside. Objective analyses showed that deep shear was increasing, the front was quite vorticity-rich, mixed-layer CAPE was soaring past 2,500 J/kg, and the boundary only would get more unstable in the next couple of hours as it cooked. The dryline intersection was due south; so I eased on over to the US-81 rest stop near Bennington to stay downshear from that.
During my stay at the rest stop, the Dudes, Dudette and Dogs crew finally finished with their windshield replacement in SLN. That took so long that chasing in Colorado was absolutely out of the question–and what do you know, about the time they were ready, and while I was throwing rocks at the rest area and scanning the skies, big towers were going up all around SLN. Isn’t that convenient?
Chase on
The deepest early towers formed almost overhead and started moving ENE along the boundary. I headed through Bennington toward Junction City to stay ahead of them, just in case they evolved into a storm, with an eye back toward that intersection near SLN. Way off in the distant NE, a huge pile of convection was visible through sporadic low clouds. On radar, that sucker was evolving explosively in just a few scans, from a cluster of echoes to a gnarly supercell with classic hook and tremendous, tornado-warned velocity couplet.
Only briefly was I tempted to go that way, however; the storm was over 90 miles away along an indirect route. Seeing Eddie Aldrine’s report of a large, slow-moving tornado near Corning (NNW of TOP) actually encouraged me for potential nearby. Surface vorticity and low-level helicity were comparable…and CAPE was bigger. If that storm could produce a fat, long-lived hose, surely anything that went up between me and SLN could be special. I stayed put near Talmage to monitor nearby towers and a few weak echoes newly developed just NW of SLN.
Meanwhile, the people and animals of the companion crew were on their way toward a meeting spot between Talmage and Bennington when the echoes NW of SLN went absolutely berserk! In what seemed like no time, the western sky grew dark with heavy anvil shading and a big supercell started to take shape W of Bennington. We joined forces and wandered N a little, thinking (erroneously) that the Bennington storm with the distant but big updraft base would move NE.
After a brief chat with the original Twister Sisters and another examination of convective trends, it became apparent that this storm was stuck in place, anchored immovably and telling us, “I’m not going anywhere. You have to come to me!”
Little tornado, big tornado
Back down to K-18 we dropped, then zoomed W toward Bennington. Rolling over some hills, we saw an odd protuberance just S of due W under that distant base…funnel! The condensation funnel briefly grew fully to ground contact…tornado! However, we didn’t dare stop to shoot, since this fleeting vortex likely was just a teaser. We knew what the Corning storm did with less, and didn’t want to be out of position for the big show from that big base.
So it was. We crawled through, then past, a nest of chasers parked and driving hither and yon, in and around Bennington. Easing a little closer, we found a relatively clean position with safe pull-off and southward escape option about 1.5 miles WNW of town along a paved, N-S road. Though a tree row was about 1/2 mile to the W, cloud-base rotation was increasing, and we dared not gamble on another vantage.
Just in time too…for enough low clouds dissipated around the storm to reveal nicely spiraling structure overhead, while a wall cloud began churning. We thought tornadogenesis was imminent every few seconds for another 5-10 minutes as the wall cloud (wide angle view) turned around and around and around at visual speeds I’ve only seen with tornadic events, with similarly rapid tail-cloud inflow. I tried to call this in to TOP, but got a busy signal.
Finally, a funnel formed on the left (S) side of the mesocyclone, quickly becoming an obvious cone tornado. A brief burst of CG lightning strikes a couple of miles to our E and NE sent me back into the vehicle, whereupon I got another busy signal on calling TOP. From here on, I called the updates into Hastings instead, for relaying to TOP.
A welcomed development: the lightning quickly calmed down, at which time I could have whipped out lawn chairs, sat back, kicked up my feet, cracked open a couple of cold ones, eaten a pizza or two, and enjoyed the view. For the next half hour, we stayed in that spot, watching the tornado grow in size, shape-shifting from fat stovepipe to barrel to wedge and everything between, a big doofus of a tornado lumbering slowly in a confined loop to our W, SW, W, and NW, getting close enough to hear but not to compel evacuation, nearly disappearing in precip then emerging again, more than once, until it ultimately got too rain-wrapped to see anymore. Then it kept going for awhile longer.
Being able to stay in one spot and watch a quasistationary, violent tornado go on (and on, and on…) in mostly uninhabited countryside…this was a completely unfamiliar and wondrous experience. Behind us, in Bennington, sirens wailed on and off for most of an hour, never needed but definitely justified–for the supercell could start moving anytime. Fortunately for the town, it didn’t, and fortunately for us, as we were between the tornado and those sirens.
Thanks to tornadic translation vectors resembling those of a two-year-old on a tricycle, I had time to call in several updates, take well north of 100 photos, post a live phone shot or two to Facebook, and just put the camera and phone down and stare with awe and appreciation at the atmospheric event unfolding just a couple of miles to the W. In fact, at one point, as the slow path loop got closest but turned northward, I closed my eyes for 30 seconds just to listen to the tornado’s deep, low voice and feel the inflow it was consuming, undistracted by anything visual. This, I promise you, was an ethereal, transcendental experience. How often will one get that opportunity?
Many moons ago, DF had vowed to release the cremated remains of his late canine chase companion, Thunder, into a tornadic supercell’s inflow. When I looked to the left and saw him shaking a bag into the strong, warm easterlies, and saw the ashes wafting westward across green fields toward that big tornado, I nearly shed a tear. Somewhere in doggie heaven, a big, goofy leonberger (who himself had seen more than a few tornadic supercells in his short life) was smiling and wagging his tail.
As for the tornado at hand, here’s a selection of images every few minutes through the rest of its visible lifespan:
Thick cone, wide angle with ambient storm structure
Barrel under big wall cloud, opaque rain-wrapping
Very fat hose, descending reflectivity core shed
Absolutely classic pose–big tornado, big wall cloud, big base
Another DRC, thick precip wrapping
Wedge, opaque curtains all around
Slight zoom view of wedge (could hear it at this point of closest approach)
Wedge with ragged, possibly multivortex filaments to its N, meso getting quite strongly occluded
Near-wedge again, thick rain-wrapping
Deeply rain-wrapped, barely visible thick, tubular cone with tail cloud nearby
Fattening again through precip gap
Last certain view of tornado before wrapping precip got too thick, once and for all.
Closing it out
We waited a few more minutes of waiting for a visual reappearance, while precip curtains orbited very fast about an inferred tornado location. It obviously was still going, and would be for at least a few more minutes. However, we also knew that no tornado survives that deeply occluded and buried in precip for very long; one only can suck in so much heavy precip before the inflow air mass becomes too dense and stable.
Seeing the rear-flank cloud edge (and core) extend nearly overhead, we decided to go back through town a couple of miles and take a big-picture perspective. This storm now resembled a large, HP drum, maybe with a dying tornado still buried in there somewhere. Seeing some rotation in a cloud base ahead of the core, we went back through town again, observing a brief, rotating wall cloud that soon got undercut by outflow.
Thinking this storm might finally move off the hodograph origin, we went W and S on K-18 across Salt Creek and briefly observed the big, turquoise-cored HP storm from a roadwork area (looking NNW and looking SSW). Other cells were forming atop its outflow, but upshear, merging in and messing up the structure.
After jumping a few more miles to the SSW, we sat in the dimming daylight for one last look at the steadily disorganizing supercell, still in the same area and surely dumping astounding storm-total rains, before heading the few miles S into SLN for celebratory dinner. Good times with friends, followed by an uneventful 4-hour drive home, capped off a decidedly successful five days of High Plains Therapy. The next day–back to work, rejuvenated and alive with the passion for the smorgasbord of atmospheric violence!