Spring 2011 Grand Finale: A Tornado-fest
Filed under: Summary
NW KS to south-central NEb
20 June 11
SHORT: Food, fishing, baby-bird rescue and a bunch of tornadoes…on final chase day of the vacation and season for us, with three tornadic supercells in northern KS and southern NEb.
LONG: Awakening to a windy, moist, scuddy morning in Alma, NEb, beneath a rip-roaring ENEly low-level jet, Elke and I knew this could be a productive storm day, but had no idea that it would land in the top few of our entire storm-observing careers. Indeed, if you include the calendar day–having witnessed the second of two spectacular, lightning-illuminated supercells after the stroke of midnight (story here), there is no question that his goes down as an all-time top-5-class chase day for either of us.
Pre-storm
After looking at morning charts, I targeted two plays:
1. Mid-day tornado potential in the “bent back” region of the occluding surface frontal zone, W of the dryline and near the surface low. Even by mid-morning, this regime was taking shape in west-central KS and moving directly N toward us, with only some diurnal heating and a storm needed to engage intercept mode.
2. Late-afternoon potential on the nose of the dry punch, near the dryline/warm-frontal triple point, over east-central or SE NEb. This is the regime I had in mind for a couple of days, but forecast backing of flow with height in the midlevels (a harbinger of linear storm modes) had me concerned.
Obviously, given where we were, #1 was a no-brainer as first choice, despite my historically lame fortune with “cold core” supercell regimes. If that option either busted or died out early enough in the afternoon, the rather slow eastward component of the deep-layer cyclone’s motion meant we could blast east, preferably on a road suited to it like I-80, and intercept the dryline storms.
With that strategic concept in mind, and a lack of food options in Alma, we headed for HDE to eat late breakfast/early lunch, then to a nearby city park to bide some time reading (Elke) and fishing (me) before storms went up.
I didn’t get too many casts into the lake because of a sad sight I found underneath a tree: two dead baby robins, blown out of their nests by one of last night’s supercells, and one still alive and shivering with hypothermia. After some deliberation about what to do, we noticed other robins and nests up the tree. Elke, who has a longstanding soft spot for baby birds, warmed the featherless little critter while I shimmied up the tree in search of a suitable nest in which to place the orphan. We got it in a snug nest (albeit alongside a much larger and older baby), hoping its new sibling could keep it warm and the new mama would feed it. Chances are it didn’t survive; but we tried.
First tornadic phase: “Long Island/Stamford” supercell
During the avian-rescue experience, a storm had formed (early, as cold-core storms often do) and quickly had become supercellular near HLC. By the time I got a good radar read on it, the storm already was tornado-warned. Though it was moving our way, we still were in HDE, well to its NNE, so…back S through Alma we went, and across the KS line. Mike U already had seen his festival of tornadoes by the time we caught the storm S of Long Island KS, but it was far from done.
Terrain in the area was somewhat choppy and frustrating to navigate, so we settled for the first decent hilltop view we could get, 3 S of Long Island. The supercell was moving toward the N and NNE at various times, with dark murk inside, a tall precip cascade on its SE (rear-flank) edge, and clear, blue sky to its E (our SE). Surface winds blew from the ENE to NE, as they would throughout the duration of our engagement with this supercell. We and the storm were a little leftward of the track of the surface low!
In the murk–and curiously, in the forward-flank interface region ahead of the main mesocyclone, we saw a small, tightly rotating wall cloud emerge, with a pencil-shaped tornado dangling beneath (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions).
The tornado lasted about three minutes and dissipated, before a different, seemingly shallow, front-flank mesocirculation started spinning like mad to our W. That planted a dusty multivortex, which also was low-contrast (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions). Whoa! I had based our intercept positioning, relative to the supercell, on the likely track of the primary mesocyclone, which stuck out eastward from the SE side of the north-moving storm.
By now, I had figured out what was going on, but that didn’t make it any less surreal. Pearls of enhanced rotation were forming and spawning front-flank tornadoes, along a necklace of very rich vorticity characterizing the inflow-outflow interface. A conceptual model of the situation looks something like this 2-D cartoon. Why this supercell was going nuts with front-flank mesocirculations, whilst most others don’t, is a question I’ll leave to the numerical modelers for the time being. In the real world of a storm intercept, this presented a strategic quandary, in that getting closer to the front-flank tornadic necklace also meant getting in the path of a rain-wrapped HP mesocyclone of a fairly fast-moving supercell.
As the second tornado churned northward, in step with storm translation, another suspicious feature caught our attention (Elke actually saw it first). A wide view of the storm (photo: as seen) shows the precip-wrapped, main mesocyclone to the left, and at far right, the dusty multivortex. Right before taking that shot, we spotted a dark, smooth, persistent, and reasonably wide lowering in another area of front-flank rotation, buried somewhat back into a precip-filled notch. That made ground contact, with rapid rotation of cloud material above and around the tapered-barrel shaped tornado. We had two ongoing, plus one that likely was underway in the main mesocyclone but not yet visible. More on that beast later. As for the two we knew, the arrows point to the visible tornadoes in this super-enhanced/zoomed version of the last shot.
We had a peculiar situation at hand.
After a few minutes, we lost sight of the southern front-flank tornado as it buried itself in precip, while the leading one narrowed and proceeded toward the N. We headed N too, crossing the KS/NEb state line about the same time as the leading tornado to our W (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions).
Once that dissipated, we still had an original, dominant mesocyclone to our SSW, in which we couldn’t see anything thanks to persistent, rotating moat of heavy precip that cloaked the mysterious tempests of danger lurking within. This situation was getting weirder all the time, and was about to become truly bizarre.
I drove through Orleans and a few miles NW on US-136, which angled us closer to the front flank and somewhat in the path of the big meso. Lo and behold, just ahead of the rain-wrapped main meso, a tall, skinny, dusty tornado came into view to our WSW (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions). This definitely was separate from the previous tornado, and probably just S of the KS/NEb state line. Meanwhile, a new and relatively robust shear-zone updraft to our NW (separate from the dissipated dusty tornado #2) started spinning frantically, and beneath a shallow, bowl-shaped and rapidly rotating lowering, spun up another short-lived, dusty tornado (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions)! After the latter tornado dissipated, the prior, dusty tube seemed to spin down gradually instead of roping out, as if it simply lost its will to rotate.
Whither the main meso? At long last, we started seeing the answer as a rapidly rotating, nearly ground-to-anvil column of rain and hail churned toward us. Something very menacing, dangerous and unsavory began to appear from within the whirling dungeon of heavy precip–a big fat tornado (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions). Look behind and above the tree row. I think what we’re seeing here is not just the rain-wrapped low levels of the tornado (dark wedge below cloud base, with helical scud coiling about).
Also, note the convective column containing the tornadic circulation (and not much larger in width than the visible tornado down low!) bending above and to the right. This is NWward with height on a N-moving storm, looking SW. [Conceptually, turn your usual NE-tilt on an E-moving storm leftward 90 deg as in the 2-D cartoon ]. In essence, you’re seeing the tornado-cyclone from ground into the mid-upper levels of the storm, visually. Yes, it was convective-looking, but corkscrewing pretty fast visually. Alas, even the mid-upper part didn’t shed its cloak of rotating rain curtains for very long; mostly it had been a bear’s cage from ground almost to anvil, for much of this storm’s lifespan in my view. I’m glad the curtains parted just long enough to reveal this fascinating deep-layer structure–and of course the hefty hose beneath.
My question: Was this the continuation of the Mr. Umscheid’s wedge from way down by HLC, or a separate tornado? Some shots by Walker Ashley seem to indicate a smaller barrel====>cone tornado earlier in this meso’s lifespan, and farther SW in KS. If so, either
1. Walker;s tornado expanded again to a rain-wrapped wedge shown here, or
2. This was a new one.
Whatever the case, the main-meso tornado likely had been ongoing for a long time, given that we had observed tremendously rotating rain curtains around the area for many minutes. This clearly was a very large, well-formed and mature tornadic vortex by the time we finally could see it. The entire tilted cloud column was rotating rapidly.
Wrapping precip again obscured the tornado within two minutes, or about the time it crossed into Nebraska. Orbiting rain curtains continued around the mesocyclone for several miles N toward Stamford an perhaps beyond, until the entire supercell evaporated from below and died W of HDE.
I read reports of “skipping” tornado paths with this storm in this area, which is bogus on two fronts:
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1. By definition, a tornado cannot “skip”. If it’s not on the ground, it’s not a tornado.
2. Semantics aside, there simply was no “skipping”. The various different tornadoes in this area near the border, lined up similarly, probably gave the illusion of “skipping” of damage.
After the initial storm died, we got fuel in HDE and then couldn’t flank the downshear Elm Creek storm. We knew it was tornadic based on spotter reports and the SRM signature, but it was planted squarely on the highway to our N, near I-80. The first storm had put us out of position to see the business end of the Elm Creek supercell, so we jumped on the Interstate with its 75 mph speed limit and pressed the pedal hard in an eastward run for the second target area.
Second tornadic phase: “Hampton and Bradshaw/Stromsburg” supercells
Visually, a series of deep, glaciating towers to our ENE-E-SE looked reachable and was growing. By the time we passed the HSI/GRI exit, an unbroken wall of dense cores loomed to the E on radar, their convective towers lit by a blend of direct and filtered sunlight. My hope was that, despite the linear mode, a “tail-end Charlie” would roll up toward I-80 after I could penetrate the line and get into the inflow air. Linear storms don’t tend to hurl gorilla hail; so I was at ease with cruising up to the back and shooting through a relative gap.
That’s exactly what we did, except that the southern part of the line was breaking up into more discrete (and disturbingly, rotating) cells right as we started the penetration. We took a pounding from marginally severe hail, gazing southward through precip to see if anything could show up in the nearest area of rotation S of the Interstate. As we cleared precip and a ragged base came into view adjacent to the core, Elke saw a brief needle funnel 4/5 of the way to the ground. That might have been a tornado; though flooded fields precluded appreciable dust generation. No debris was visible beneath.
As we neared the Hampton exit, another core loomed to the SSE, moving N. We continued to press E, getting pounded by still more hail. Clearly the line had broken up into closely-packed supercells and we needed to get out of their way! A few minutes after we cleared the N side of the intensifying precip area, I glanced behind us to see a barrel-shaped, rain-wrapped tornado in the S part of the same core, about to cross the Interstate (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions). That was a little too close for comfort, though we really had about 5 minutes’ cushion. I pulled off the road, jumped out, and gestured wildly at some westbound traffic not to go that way. Fortunately, they slowed down and pulled aside.
What appeared to be a big, low-visibility and significant tornado (as it turned out to be!) was almost upon the Interstate (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions), and I was hoping nobody would drive into it. Enough precip wrapped around the tornado that we couldn’t see it with our eyeballs as it crossed I-80 (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions), though it narrowed somewhat to a stilted stovepipe and became more visible again between I-80 and US-34 (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions).
The Hampton tornado appeared to hook NNW and move away from us. Our last view of it (photo: as seen and super-enhanced versions) came with a troubling realization: we still were getting peppered with precip, including increasingly large hail! The real tail-end Charlie still hadn’t reached I-80 yet; and indeed, another core was moving overhead with a low base diffusely visible to our SSE. Time to high-tail it east again! As we pondered getting off the Interstate at the Bradshaw exit, Elke looked out and up to see rapid cloud-base rotation nearly overhead, atop that very exit. We kept going!
Behind and slightly leftward of us, the tornado first appeared in the rear-view mirror while driving out from under the meso. A small dust plume spun up just N of I-80. Above that loomed a rotating cone funnel that extended about 1/3 down from cloud base. We zipped a mile or so E, then pulled safely off the road to watch. This tornado was highly visible and quite photogenic, a marvelously sheathed column into which the condensation funnel seemed to poke, spike-like. “Finally,” I thought, “all these tornadoes today and we have a high-contrast specimen!” I said something more coarse, but fortunately, cannot recall precisely what.
Without an immediately available north road, we watched for a few minutes as the tube widened and retreated northward away from us, a wide-angle view revealing more of the tail-end supercell’s swirly updraft structure. Although rather distant, we had the tornado in view all the way through JYR and up US-81 to a point 4 ESE of Polk, where we pulled over briefly to watch it rope out to the WNW. This was our longest continuous view of any of the day’s tornadoes: 18 minutes.
A new lowered base even farther N told me this storm wasn’t through with cyclic tornado production yet. As it was moving N rather quickly, slightly ahead of abeam to port side, the town of Stromsburg and its inevitable slowdown dead ahead, we had to get moving for any hope of seeing the next hose. A few miles S of Stromsburg, we saw the newest and last tornado of our day emerge from the haze, to our NW.
Of course, traffic slowed to a crawl in town, a chain of cars inching N at about half the posted 25 mph speed limit, some slowing down or turning indecisively as if thoroughly bewildered. Townsfolk stood in at least half the yards gazing in various skyward directions, not sheltered, despite the ominous wail of storm sirens. I thought, “They’re safe and don’t realize it yet; but if the tornado were headed into town, we would have multiple casualties amongst all these unprepared and confused citizens”. What I actually said might have been a tad less civilized, so it’s good that I can’t recall that.
By the time we got extricated from Stromsburg and headed N for a few miles, contrast improved enough to pull W half a mile and get a few decent shots, including this one looking NW across a corn field at the stout, grinding vortex. Motion of the ragged cloud base around the top of the visible tornado was impressively speedy. Driving a few more miles N on US-81, we finally got roughly abeam of the tornado again, only to see it rapidly narrow and then rope out.
Just in case the storm would cycle once more, we headed up an unmarked road off the east bend of US-81, in the general direction of Duncan. Alas, the supercell quickly displayed a rain-wrapped, outflow-dominant structure, and would produce no more tornadoes. We turned around to head back to JYR, photograph a couple of elevated cells (looking E and looking N from the S side of JYR), grab a room, and get some celebratory steak dinner before restaurants began to close.
Epilogue
A hearty meal was in order too. During a long storm-intercept day, we successfully had observed at least 8 and perhaps up to 10 tornadoes, from three different supercells, in two separate forecast targets and meteorological regimes. All I can say is, wow…only 3 May 1999 clearly exceeds this for my one-day tornado total. We don’t chase just to see tornadoes–far from it, actually–but you bet we’re appreciative of them for their rarity, uniqueness and power–the dichotomously ironic “Beauty of Atmospheric Violence” that is the title for my storm-photography shows. Best of all, nobody was injured through all the whirling mayhem of the day.
It was an amazing grand finale to an unprecedentedly bountiful 2011 Great Plains severe-storm vacation (and season)!
I had called in several of the tornadoes as soon as safety and cell signals would allow, a few while they still were underway. Within a couple weeks after we returned, I processed the day’s images (before all others from this vacation) and sent an itemized table of tornado times and estimated locations to the affected WFOs, with embedded links to many of the same photos as above. That table includes times, locations and links to the above photos. The tornado log file is in the public domain, and linked here in MS Excel format, freely accessible for anyone interested.
Three States of Strangeness
Slapout OK and vicinity
13 Jun 10
SHORT: Observed entire lifespan of supercell from SE of Dumas TX to near Coldwater KS including at least one tornado near Slapout OK. Also observed floods, beautiful clouds and bizarre cross-country cycling experience.
LONG: It was just another ordinary, ho-hum chase day with a rain-wrapped tornado to our south moving east, uncanny resemblances between the Texas Panhandle and the Everglades, a house propped up by a Frigidaire, and an Austrian bicyclist riding across the prairie to the beat of techno-dance music from a German-speaking mobile DJ. Nothing special or different here…
The strongest combination of moisture, instability, lift and shear was forecast along a segment of the former cold front (now gone quasistationary) from SW KS to the eastern TX Panhandle, dependent strongly on how far S storms could backbuild in a manner sufficiently discrete to permit cyclic mesocyclogenesis and greater potential for tornado development. The outflow-reinforced boundary lay from just S of Dumas to near Coldwater at 15Z, and wasn’t going to go far except where effectively shunted E by localized convective outflow pools. The 12Z AMA sounding had a very weak cap atop anomalously large dew points, with clearing skies, so early initiation (perhaps even before noon) was virtually certain.
After leaving our lodging, the question of the day became apparent:
Riddle: What do Chuck, Keith, Texas Beef, and Natural Gas have in common?
Answer: All are names of roads crossing TX-152 within 10 miles E of Dumas.
Heading E from Dumas toward the boundary, we saw towers already arising along it to our SSE by 1130 CDT (1630Z) — these would evolve into the eventual Perryton-Slapout area supercell. We got on the warm side of the boundary between Borger-Pampa, as the same towers deepened and glaciated to our NW. The chase was on, and it was only noon! The visit for fuel and burritos at a Pampa Allsups had to be succinct, so we could head N toward the projected storm target of Perryton.
Once back up out of the Canadian Breaks and atop the Caprock again, we found flooded fields everywhere from the wet spring, led by the previous day’s egregiously profuse rains. These cowboys S of Farnsworth had to herd their herd onto an island in what clearly wasn’t supposed to be a lake. Evapotranspiration was a given on this day! Every time I got out of the car — curiously, except near the tornado — mosquitoes descended in voracious plumes, bloodsucking varmints eager to draw sustenance from anything warm-blooded, and especially from storm observers. I wondered how many “skeeters” ended up advected into supercell updrafts and entombed in the cores of hailstones.
Our towers grew into a fuzzy supercell with a CAPE-starved appearance near Farnsworth, slightly behind the boundary. It probably was surace-based, but not in the best air mass at the time, but did exhibit occasional but not particularly strong cloud-base rotation from broad lowerings (looking NW).
Meanwhile, strong cells were firing back down between Dumas-Pampa again, which we easily could intercept if this supercell fizzled. Instead, updrafts continued to develop in a break between our activity and the southern convection, merging in with the rear flank of the nearby storm. It all remained rather disorganized for about an hour, backbuilding at a rate nearly equivalent to its translation up the boundary, but with a slight eastward net component toward Perryton. We headed S of Perryton and down a submerged US-83 before the storm reached the area. Trucks in front demonstrated the shallowest path through the dead-still water, and that the road remained intact beneath; this is where driving a high-clearance 4×4 pickup came in handy. Such positioning would get us into position to intercept the southern storms if this activity couldn’t get better organized, or if it did, to head E and N to stay with the original convection, without dealing with the town and nearby flooding again.
Our adjacent storm developed a large, sculpted shelf cloud, made even more scenic by the foreground of the huge flood S of town that I called Lake Perryton. The south side of the storm sported a classic shelf, while the N side still wanted to be a supercell, with a tail cloud and occasional, weakly- to non-rotating lowerings. None of this, land or sky, looked much like the High Plains that it was!
Most of all, this did not look like a storm that soon would produce tornadoes. I was getting impatient with it, but instead of bailing S forthwith, I moved a few miles away and examined an abandoned house S of town with an eye back to the N, while stiff, cold outflow winds pressed down adjacent wheat. Good thing we didn’t give up on the storm, too, as it started to look better-organized and more like a supercell again (wide-angle looking N over Perryton). Its own outflow had carved out a swath of convection-free air upshear, while SE winds to its SE maintained good storm-relative inflow. Looking N from SW of Booker, a very well-defined clear slot and wall cloud appeared, and we knew we had to keep this storm in our sights.
About 10 minutes after this shot, taken looking NW from just E of Booker, the mesocyclone region became rain-wrapped from our perspective, then immediately spawned the long-lived supercell’s first tornado, visible mostly to observers who buried themselves deep into the immediate mesocyclone area on muddy backroads. By then we were repositioning E, then N, to stay ahead of the storm.
Recognizing this as an evolving, tornadic HP situation where one needs to get tucked into the notch NE of the mesocirculation to have the best shot at seeing a tube, we set up shop on US-412, in the OK Panhandle, between Elmwood and Slapout. That road provided a ready east escape, an option not available last time I was in a similar situation (with Rich T on 19 May). While watching the accelerating supercell approach, we spotted and photographed another abandoned house, this one strongly dependent on an antique, rusty refrigerator for its survival! When that porch overhang goes, the rest of the structure won’t take long to follow it down into the weeds.
We moved uphill and N 1/2-mile, watching the storm approach. A partly rain-wrapped, rotating, bowl-shaped lowering appeared to our SW (wide-angle view at 1611 CDT/2111 Z, left side) that looked like it meant serious business. We needed to get back down to US-412 then uphill again to the E, in case that turned tornadic (it probably was already), and in case we had to make the great escape. On the way down, we spotted VOF Doswell roaming the grounds of the very same house, but didn’t have time to stop for idle chitchat.
Just after we climbed E and parked beside 412, a brief funnel and some diffuse multivortex filaments appeared under the lowering at 1616 CDT, just before I could shoot. Although the interceding, non-condensational stage lasted a few minutes afterward, I believe this was one continuous, tornadic circulation with the next stage, which manifest as a bulbous, tapering cone, then a well-defined and rain-wrapped cone with filamentous elements whirling beneath. By 1620 CDT the visible tornado became elongated, tapered, curved, narrower in appearance (normal and wide-angle views, by which time the tornado was to our S, moving E). We lost sight of the increasingly ill-defined tornado in wrapping rain to our SSE at 1622, by which time the onset of precip overhead (in the inner-notch region) compelled us to bail E on 412.
Now look at any of the wide-angle tornado shots and imagine the tornado away. What do you see? Otherwise, it looks like an outflow-dominant, rather junky storm organization with a big gust front and some pretty turquoise coloring on its N side. I’ve seen perhaps hundreds of similar-looking storms with no tornado wrapped in there behind the ragged shelf cloud; but in this case, there it was. And that’s all the supercell had left in a tornadic sense.
From then on, the storm’s successive mesocyclonic occlusions ingested excessive amounts of rain and outflow for tornadogenesis. We weren’t sure of this yet, of course; so we zigzagged N and E toward Laverne, meeting Howie along the way (action shot) and nearly getting struck by a staccato CG — the first among a sudden barrage that erupted immediately NE of the mesocyclone(s) in an area heretofore bereft of such a deadly menace. The bolt in question, which was so close I couldn’t tell the direction it hit, gave off an audible “snap” a split second before the simultaneous flash and slicing report of thunder. That momentarily disturbing sequence sent me leaping back into the vehicle glad to be alive and unharmed! I wonder if the snapping noise was the audible effect of a ground-up discharge from some close-by object that preceded the actual return stroke by a fraction of a second.
Shortly after Howie left and before encountering the CG, this shot revealed a dark, HP “stormzilla”. Notice the stubby, translucently rain-wrapped funnel at lower left, looking WSW from N of Slapout (heavily-enhanced crop-n-zoom). That highly suspicious protuberance emerged at 1640 CDT from some heavier precip. It also resided beneath a small, obviously rotating tail/collar feature rolling northward along the E face of the storm, toward a broader but weaker mesocirculation in the dark area to its right (N). We cannot be sure whether or not this was a brief tornado.
Those were the last shots we took from the storm’s inflow region. It started to gust out, merge with adjoining convection, and evolve a bowing feature as it headed for the area between Laverne and Coldwater KS, hot on our tail. With a central-northern plains target to reach in a couple of days, our minds turned to the potential photo ops on the backside of the complex, so we rushed up to Coldwater and let the northern part of the storm roll over us with likely-severe gusts and a barrage of subsevere hail. After the requisite inland-hurricane experience, we cruised WNW toward DDC for lodging and supper.
Along the way, we noticed a peculiar and wonderful combination of visual effects: underneath the MCS’ trailing anvil (not seen in the photo), laminarity along the top of the boundary layer, marked by a hazy delineation, and backdropped by pastel light from and through convective towers. Seldom have I witnessed such a combination, soothing in its beauty. Then things got [i]really strange.
As we stopped to watch and shoot that scene, a few miles SE of Ford KS, a distinctive male voice could be heard, slowly rising in volume. Elke asked me what I said; I hadn’t been talking. In a few more seconds, the source became apparent: a car slowly driving southeastbound toward us, on the shoulder of US-400, lights on, following a cyclist. The cyclist, dressed in skin-tight uniform covered with colorful sponsorship logos, rolled on past, followed closely by a car even more festooned in corporate logos. These, however, mostly were unrecognized ads, and the voice booming from the car’s loudspeakers was German! It was hard for Elke (a native German-speaker) to make out what he was saying, however, beneath the pounding beat of Euro-tech dance music also booming from the speakers. It was a rolling DJ, following a European cyclist across the Kansas prairie into the backside of an MCS!
We stopped in Ford, and right there at the convenience store was an RV parked, with many of the same logos as the weird cyclist/car tandem. Overcome by curiosity, Elke and I asked them (well, she did, since she spoke their language). The cyclist was from Austria — indeed, from the same general area as Salzburg, where Elke was born. He was riding across the USA from San Diego, and was only about 8 days into the trip. This means he had ridden well over 100 miles a day, including over the Mojave Desert and the mountains of southern Colorado. You have to respect that! They exchanged pleasantries, but seemed disappointed when she had to answer negatively to their question about where a good dinner could be found in town. For that, for them, it was either head back to Dodge or go all the way to Pratt…
After our own good dinner (a celebratory steak) in DDC, we parked on a hilltop W of town for a short-lived but gorgeous display of mammatus in the sunset light. The clouds glowed somewhere between champagne, iced tea and bronze on the spectrum of hues, and made for a marvelous conclusion to one of the more bizarre but enjoyable storm-intercept days in a long time.
Birthday Supercells in Northwest Nebraska
near Harrison, NE, 21 May 10
SHORT: Intercepted 4 supercells, 2 after dark, near Harrison NEb, with 2 funnels from twilight storm S of Harrison.
LONG:
My two main forecast areas on this day were in eastern Colorado, for any storms that could form and move ENE off the Front Range or eastward-extending ridges (Palmer and Cheyenne), and of course the classical upslope play into the Laramie Mountains. Since I began the day in Russell, the CO target was much closer, and more probable to reach by convective eruption time. The idea was to pass through, and if it looked dead, continue onward into SE Wyoming or Nebraska.
Unfortunately I got stuck at a long construction delay between Burlington and Wray, where US-385 is down to one lane with a pilot car driving 15-25 mph for about that many total miles. After getting out of that horrendous mess, I thought my Wyoming/Nebraska hopes were ruined, so I photographed an abandoned farmstead for a bit S of AKO, while waiting for storms to fire in northeast Colorado. The air mass kept looking too stable and stratified, and I gave up once storms E of the Laramie Range began to sustain themselves.
Unfortunately, because of the long intervening distance needed to intercept the resulting supercell, I never made it to the Wyoming phase of its life cycle, when the structure was best. Instead I cruised N from Mitchell on NE-29 to get ahead of the storm, knowing it would be moving into gradually more stable air. A portion of the legitimately scientific V.O.R.T.EX.-2 fleet came up 29 right behind me, along with some pseudo-scientific vehicle with a bogus-looking “TORNADO AND HURRICANE RESEARCH” sticker prominently plastered thereupon. I felt like stopping to ask the “TORNADO AND HURRICANE RESEARCH” crew what papers they’ve published with their “RESEARCH”, but knew the answer, and more importantly, had better things to do — namely, observe the supercell.
Lightning activity above me, in the anvil, was increasing, so I got back in my vehicle. Not a minute after I did, I happened to spot a CG hit within less then 50 feet of that “RESEARCH” vehicle, and about half a mile downhill from me! It even looked like the lightning might have hit them. I started the truck and was throwing it into gear to rush to their aid, when they abruptly pulled out of their spot and zoomed southward past me. It was a very fortunate thing none of them got struck! One of these days, however, under less atmospheric duress, I intend to query such crews in the field and find out about the nature of their “RESEARCH” publications. Anyway…
This shot fairly well represents my view of the old Torrington storm as it scooted across the border into Nebraska. At times it did develop weakly rotating, scuddy wall clouds, but its encroachment upon more stable air yielded the expected result with time ( here shown as a higher, flatter wall cloud with precip-filled occlusion-downdraft slot, behind a sticknet). That storm moved N and NE of me, and I prepared to head to Harrison to look for lodging.
Meanwhile, I parked for a spell to listen to the cheerful choruses of western meadowlarks and breathe the refreshingly rain-cooled High Plains air behind the first storm. V2 left the area, and in the twilight, a new, small supercell formed along or just a shade N of the outflow from the other one, SW of Harrison and about 15 miles to my WNW.
Rather quickly, some cloud-base rotation and lowerings developed under a broad, elongated updraft area, followed in quick succession by a skinny, scuddy funnel (deeply enhanced crop-n-zoom) and then a lower, more robust-looking and separate funnel (enhanced crop-n-zoom). Both of those funnels were quite transient, and I could not detect any dust or debris at the level of the (wet) ground beneath. If either was a brief tornado, it was too weak and short-lived to count as such, so I probably still haven’t seen a tornado on my birthday. Still, I’m glad to have had the experience.
The twilight supercell moved too deeply into rain-cooled air left behind by the first, and weakened considerably. I got a room at the only motel in Harrison — the Sage Motel, a friendly if rather forlorn and cramped place — and called Elke and my kids. One highlight of the day was my daughter and her friends singing “Happy Birthday” to me as a quartet serenade!
Meanwhile, two new supercells popped up in Wyoming, SW of town, headed that way! After getting off the phone, I wandered a few miles W of town to watch the nocturnal supercell pair move quickly past, their structures faintly illuminated at times by in-cloud lightning. I attempted photography, but it was just too dark out there, the lightning too faint. The rear-flank precip core of the second storm hit Harrison, but without severe wind or hail.
I had to be in Denver the following night to meet Elke and prepare for her mom’s public memorial on Sunday the 22nd, so the potential (and realized!) major tornado day in northeastern SD was too far for me to chase. Instead, on the 22nd, I photographed morning fog in the Pine Ridge area N of town, then drove from Harrison to DEN, stopping for a pleasant hike and photography excursion Agate Fossil Beds National Monument along the way. Meanwhile the ultimate tornado-feast was about to begin for other chasers 250-300 miles to my NE.