Day 15 of the Great Storm Chase!

It's been a 17-hour day through 4 states (Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska) and in all honesty I'm surprised I'm even writing this blog tonight. Today was another horrible day in the way of disappointment. I feel like that's pretty much my theme in these blogs but I have to tell you, it's most def not by choice!

We started the day in Guymon, OK and were planning on heading towards the northwestern Kansas area. We had a very quick meeting and I ate my breakfast in literally 2 minutes and while analyzing and drawing out a surface map. We met at 9:00am CDT and we all agreed that we needed to hit the road ASAP to get to the area by the time we needed to, so we left. The ones of us analyzing and drawing out maps had to do it on the road and we were told to report our findings to Dr. Call 20 minutes after. I know I'm improving my skills because I'm absolutely horrible at creating isolines for some reason and have a hard time analyzing these maps that we get but today I seemed to be able to do it without much trouble at all and it was right on cue.

After we discussed everything that was going on via walkie talkies, we kept heading towards northwestern Kansas where we ate lunch and then decided to stop at a nearby hotel to use their Internet to get more soundings and outlooks from the SPC. It appeared that the best helicity was to the north but the best CAPE's were filling into the south. Also, we had decent moisture and temps all over but there was a pesky cloud deck that stationed itself in the areas we were hoping to get some storms. We also found that the LCL and LFC heights weren't too far apart meaning that the storms didn't have too far to go before reaching the level of free convection (LFC) and thus didn't have much CIN. This wasn't necessarily a good thing because this would potentially cause the storms to squall out and not be supercellular in nature. We had to make a choice about what we should do and we decided to stay put for a little while because we thought we had a good chance of good storms where we were.

We stuck around in the motel parking lot for awhile, with their permission of course, and the guys threw the football around and a few others of us just kind of sat around and kept an eye on things. We were there for a long time and in actuality it almost kind of reminded me of Hampton Beach. It was extremely hot, the motel looked like something straight from Hampton Beach, and we were all just chilling and not doing too much but hanging out. I miss project!

Dr. Call told us that there was a supercell forming in eastern Wyoming and wanted to know if we wanted to try to get to it. The thing was that the cell was 4 hours north of us and at that time didn't seem like the best idea. We figured that if we went after that cell we would cut ourselves off from any other possibility of getting to anything else that might fire up. The weirdest part was that the cell formed through the cloud deck...not normal since the daytime heating isn't as intense there. We sat around and hung out some more when we found that a tornado warning was reported for the cell in Wyoming and the cell had the perfect, textbook hook to it on the radar. It was the exact picture that we've studied in supercell formation and hooks. This thing had shear, high VIL's, large hail, and now a hook. We knew it was only a small matter of time before the tornado would touchdown. We were disappointed but we knew there was no way we could've gotten to that cell in time since there was only a half an hour to an hour between the time that we saw the cell and the time that it intensified to that point.

We decided that we did need to move somewhere though so we decided to head into northeastern Colorado since some storms were firing up south of Denver. We packed up and moved on about 40 minutes west and we made another decision to either go for the storms coming up from southern Denver or to move north to intercept the cell that was moving in from Wyoming into Nebraska. This was the point where we found out that tornado was reported from that cell that popped up in Wyoming and it was on the ground for 24 minutes! That's ridiculous! Apparently, Vortex 2 and Reed Timmer's group (the TIV and Discovery Channel people) got to that tornado on time and got amazing video and pictures of it...AWESOME! Just what we needed to boost morale, NOT.

We decided that it would be best to head north because the area had the best looking indices overall. We jumped in the vans and shot north into Nebraska to intercept these storms. We got closer to the storm and were heading into the part we wanted to be the most when we were having issues seeing past the hilly terrain. We were driving and all pumped when we saw what looked like a wall cloud. Then, hanging from that wall cloud was a little notch that appeared to start turning into a funnel. There were several notches all around it too and there was even a few wall clouds within that same area. It looked like a funnel starting to come down then we all started chanting and screaming when we saw it hit the ground! We were so excited to finally see a tornado and we were all so ecstatic!!

When we got closer, we realized that what we saw was a mere allusion. It was only scud from the storm and is often mistaken for funnel clouds, wall clouds, tornadoes, etc. AWESOME! This is when we started to really get ticked I'm pretty sure. We had an amazing view of the sky with the sunsetting in the background, rain shafts and a meso to the right of it, and another promising cell to the left of it. It was definitely one of the most amazing views I've ever seen!

We decided to go on top of a nearby hill in the field neighboring the road where we parked to get a better view since the hill blocked it from the other cell just next to us. We were up there for awhile when we decided that it would be best to come down since the lightning started to pick up a lot more. We could've easily been struck if we stayed up there. We came back to the vans and watched the storm hoping and praying for a tornado until it got pretty dark. We decided to move back up the road a little bit to get a better view of the cell to our left.





We went on top of that hill to get a better view as well. When we did, we watched the storm desperately seeking the rain shaft and bottom of the shelf cloud for a lowering wall cloud, but it never happened. We looked back towards the road to see some of Vortex 2 traveling past us. A local college girl joined us for a small part of our time while we were looking at the sky because she was a storm spotter. She was on the phone with her dad as the Vortex 2 vehicles passed by and she said that we were on the Weather Channel live. Apparently, the truck was doing a live feed of the storm we were watching when they drove by and they got us on top of the hill.







We watched that one for awhile too but it was getting really dark at this point and the lightning was getting more and more intense. In fact, there was one lightning strike that was less than a mile away and we all ran as fast as we could back to the vans, haha. We went up the road a little bit more to keep watching these storms from the inside of our vans because they had amazing potential to drop a tornado. There was lightning all around us and the once barren road was littered with local storm spotters, enthusiasts, and chasers all hoping for a tornado to form. We finally decided to leave when we couldn't see a thing anymore and it was already after 9:30 pm MDT. We still had a little over 2 hours to our hotel and we still had to stop for dinner.

We made a quick stop at a gas station that had a Subway and we noticed that everyone and their brother that was out chasing was also there. We saw some of Vortex 2's greatest equipment there: the 2 Doppler's on wheels and the mesonet. Apparently, the Weather Channel's on-air talent was also there but I was in such a horrible mood that I didn't really care too much. We got back in the vans to head to our final destination in Lexington, NE when we looked at the radar to see that the highway we were planning on taking the whole way there was getting hammered with baseball sized hail and a good threat for a tornado. There was a tornado warning out for that exact area and we had to be very cautious because of the huge hail and the fact that if there was a tornado, we wouldn't be able to see it--making it incredibly dangerous.

After a long discussion and look at the maps, we decided to start out on that road still and to pull off in Paxton, NE. It was also during this time that we found out that a tornado struck Paxton only 20 minutes earlier...Awesome! Another tornado out of reach and impossible to see, literally.

We got to Paxton and reevaluated to find that the storm that was once tracking south southeast was now tracking straight east. This was great news because it meant that our path would be crystal clear to get to our hotel. When we pulled off in Paxton, we passed another entourage of Vortex 2 and a whole heap of semi's and cars pulled off on the side of the road too scared to punch through the storm--who could blame them? Part of our reasoning to continue on was because one of Vortex 2's most expensive piece of equipment continued on US-80, the road we were debating taking, and we knew that they wouldn't drive that into baseball sized hail. When we saw that they were going for it, we knew that it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to continue on instead of trying to wait the storm out, so we left.

The rest of the night was smooth sailing but we didn't get to our hotel until 2:00 am CDT this time...like I said, I'm surprised I'm even writing this right now but I wanted to do it while it was still fresh. Tomorrow's outlooks look okay but worse than today's so we can only hope now...oh, we can only hope. We only have about 3 more days roughly and this is a very bittersweet ending as of now. Tensions are at a max, frustrations overloaded, and the group is getting dangerously close to our breaking point. We each feel so horribly defeated right now and it seems as if anyone could snap at any minute...not a good thing that's for sure. Hope for the best!

Good night!