05/29/04 REPORTS: KS, NE, MO, OK & Northern Plains

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<img src=http://www.underthemeso.com/chase2004/may29/attica/dsc00025.jpg width=350 height=250>
Attica Tornado at around 7:30pm CDT. Video still zoomed in on ground action. The video is somewhat spectacular as this tornado reminded me of Chuck Doswell's Pampa video (minus the gobs of structural debris!) in terms of violence at ground level despite its narrow structure.

<img src=http://www.underthemeso.com/chase2004/may29/Dscn7722.jpg width=350 height=250>
Freeport tornado at 7:54pm. Looking southeast.

<img src=http://www.underthemeso.com/chase2004/may29/Dscn7749.jpg width=350 height=250>
Conway Springs "wedge" tornado at 8:45pm. Looking north from US160...8 S Conway Springs

For a gallery of all my digital pictures of these tornadoes, please visit http://www.underthemeso.com/chase2004/may2.../digphotos.html

I will upload some .wmv's in the not too distant future, so stay tuned! The Attica narrow drill-press zoomed in with intense debris cloud is a must see :)

Mike U
 
Melissa Moon and I; along with chasers Kyle Mosley and Chris Nuttel (sorry if I butched your last names) intercepted 10 (possibly 11; as per countless video reviews from three different cameras) on Saturday, May 29 across Harper, Sumner, Sedgwick Co. Kansas. Spectacular video was captured by Mel and I; as well as Chris and Kyle.

Will make this as brief as possible:

Departed Norman around 10pm CT Friday en route to Wichita. I had two target regions; one being the Wellington/Wichita, KS region (southern target), and Belleville, KS region (northern target; which verified as well). Upon leaving Norman, NWR stated a high risk was now in place over N. CEN. OK and S. CEN. KS. Wow; I thought this would mean certain bustola as per previous experiences over the past nine years or so. Arrived in ITC around 4am; showered, slept, and awoke around 9am fresh faced and quasi-well rested.

Phoned Brian Morganti for a few AFD's from ITC, DDC, and TOP; all of which were encouraging; followed by hand plotting surface obs on my road atlas. The next stop was breakfast, followed by a phone call from Jim Leonard (which consisted of very encouraging words; and a few "big storm" statements ;0) Jim compared the setup of Saturday's event to 26-April-1991; alas, that statement alone was encouragement in its own right. Checked out of the ITC Super 8 motel and headed to Park City, KS for lunch and a library stop. Pulled in data at the Park City Community Library; becoming thrilled by not only the surface observations we were experiencing in real-time, but what the RUC (YUC) was progging. I overestimated storm motion; and was thrilled later on in the day at how slow moving the storm we witnessed actually was.

OK; this is turning into a book; so I'll sum up before I fall asleep...

Since I'm a literary slugabed attm; I will route you to Melissa Moon's homepage with further text and photos. Normally I would pontificate (in an electronic sense) this event to death, but I must get some sleep before the 13 hour drive back to Kalamazoo from Norman on Monday (ahhh... I can't wait until the day I'm down here for grad school - god willing ;0)

Here's the link to Mel's page (which may currently not work; but check back nevertheless:

http://www.geocities.com/musicmelou/may292004.html

Between the two of us; we shot over 4-5 hours of videotape (much of mine on a 3CCD MiniDV camcorder) coupled with numerous digital stills (Mel's camera) and 35mm slides. Will post slides/video *sometime* this year... stating "sometime" as I have not updated *any* chase accounts since the "Ocarche Twins" on the 27-March-2004.

***Need ITC's WCM's email address; and or ITC NWSFO's mailing address***

Amazing day! Was glad this monster didn't track into Wichita! Great stills/video had by all whom were on this storm... let the tape swapping begin!

..Blake..

Blake W. Naftel - KC8VPG
[email protected]
www.mammatus.com
 
Dave Fick, Eric Nguyen, Scott Currens, and I got on the Harper/Sumner County storm before it crossed into Kansas from Oklahoma
Click to expand...

Jeff,

Was you by chance on 100 Ave. between highway 160 and highway 44 north of Freeport and northeast of Anthony? Me and another chaser headed back north towards 160 to see if anyone needed help after the tornado passed through and saw a number of chasers pass by us with weather station mounts on top of the car.

I'm fairly sure it was, I recognized one of the cars being that of Eric Nguyen. Anyways that was an incredible storm! And awesome picture you got also!

Check out my pictures at http://www.jkdigitalphotography.com/may29.html
 
Does anyone have any shots of the Missouri Storms on Sat

After seeing my first tornado on Monday a week ago, I sent my Ex Boss up into the mix on Sat. I stayed home and manned the radars while guiding him into the correct spot. Wouldnt ya know it, His first was actually 2 tornadoes 4 miles apart. Had him sittin on Mo 116 just east of Lathrop Mo and Plattsburg Mo. The one near Lathrop continued to become a large wedge tornado and looked impressive for a while before dying out just outside of Cameron. Seemed to be a lot of twisters training over the same areas. Local News Reports gave a prelim count of 21. This all in a 6-7 county area. Amazing. Missouri has been under the gun for about a week. Its time for a breather. Does anyone have any pics of these storms. It may of been hard to shoot given the fact of storms reforming behind each other.

Mark
 
Well I headed up north thinking of staying between Witchita and OKC. I stopped in Wellington around 1100 to download data and wait for a couple of people. Around 1200 we decided to head NW to around Hutchinson on the way there I stopped again to see if any MD's were issued. I stopped just outside of Witchita and saw an MD for North Central KS. We decided to head more north than west. Got to just east of Great Bend at 1400. We waited there seeing tower after tower go up and not break the cap. We could see the large SC to our north but decided to stand our ground.

Finally around 1500 we saw a tower with a sustained updraft break the cap to our SW. We raced down there to around Pratt. This cell was looking great for about 30 minutes, it had a nice meso w/ a lowering and was sucking in moisture like it was a big gulp. We followed this storm for about an hour until it looked outflow dominant and merged with a couple others to form what appeared to be a small MCS.

We left that cell and headed into Hutchinson to get some data and eat. At this point it was around 1900 and we heard about the Harper Co. Cell. We packed up and raced down there. Decided to go around the back side and swing around the the SE of it (bad idea). Even though the view was extrodinary from the immediate back side of this thing, it was a bad idea b/c we got stuck with the cops closing roads. So after being turned off of hwy 160 we took some dirts trying to catch up. At one point we reached Argonia and saw a sattelite funnel, it might have touched down briefly. We kept hauling it and having to turn around b/c of either cops or debris in the road. Finally we got close enough to see a low contrast(from where we were) stove pipe tornado, to our NE in Conway Springs.

Long Story short we chased it a while longer, well into the night, saw nothing more and headed home. All in all an ok day, I was really dissapointed we missed out on the best part of the Harper Co. cell.
 
Jeff,

Was you by chance on 100 Ave. between highway 160 and highway 44 north of Freeport and northeast of Anthony?
Click to expand...

It's possible you saw Scott and Eric - they were down in that area. Dave and I, however, never made it south of 160 after the Attica tornado. We were in a brown Honda Accord with a couple of antennas on the trunk.
 
Here are the radar scans (BREF and SRM) on the Harper County, Kansas storm, superimposed on a topographic map.

http://www.stormtrack.org/04may29/

(For the beginners, the file times are in UTC, so subtract 5 hours to get Central Daylight Time)

These were generated with Digital Atmosphere Workstation Pro (beta)... the JPEG output was kind of soft, even at low compression, so I generated with GIF, which has a somewhat muddy palette (due to the 8-bit colors). I might look for another format to do these in next time, like PNG.

Tim
 
After 47 chases in 3.5 years without a confirmed tornado, I'm happy to report the streak is at an end. I captured somewhere between 5-10 separate touchdowns with the storm in Sumner County, KS, near the towns of Argonia and Conway Springs. I had a half-mile wide wedge pass within 1 mile of me also. So, the streak broke in a big way.

I hope to have photos and video clips and a full report on my website within the next day. I'll post a link when it's up.

My video has also been featured on all major networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX) and has aired in Tulsa, Wichita, OKC, and Odessa.
 
Video clip from 5/29:

http://wvlightning.com/2004/may29.rm

A few video grabs:

Calumet, OK tornado:
http://wvlightning.com/2004/may29a.jpg
http://wvlightning.com/2004/may29b.jpg

Flying storage bin in Geary:
http://wvlightning.com/2004/may29c.jpg

Airborne tree in tornado near Concho, OK:
http://wvlightning.com/2004/may29d.jpg

Calumet, OK tornado:
http://wvlightning.com/2004/may29e.jpg
Click to expand...

Damn Dan, weren't your very first tornadoes back on May 12? How many have you seen since??? You've been on fire :shock:
 
Was anyone on the Comway Springs tornadoes near dusk on May 29? I'm
wondering if there was some kind of "hand-off" east of there around dark. We were vieoing a large white stovepipe when we came upon the road block SE of Conway Springs, on KS49. When we turned east onto some backroad, we lost site of the tornado behind a row of trees. When we had regained our view, there was a smaller white stovepipe, but it seems to be much further NE of where the original one had been. Maybe it was the same one, but if it is, it shrunk about 10 times its previous size in about 10 seconds, and retrograded back NE about a mile in that same time frame.

There were a lot of chasers already parked and shooting video while we were repositioning.....can anyone confirm there were two white tornadoes ESE of Conway Springs near dusk, or was it all just one???
 
I was on the storm by Argonia. I believe the final count on tornadoes for me is 5. I spent a lot of time just north of Argonia following right in behind the wedge which was pretty much tracking north down the road. There were two other chasers (one was a white minivan) navigating the power line obstacle course with me with the wedge right in front of us. It was a very exciting chase that I will never forget. In response to some advice I recieved from a seasoned chaser in Harper county on May 12, I stopped about a half mile or less away from the first tornado which was small but had pretty intense circulation at the ground and just listened to it, what an incredible sound that is that some of us are fortunate enought to experience.
 
I, along with just about every other chaser, experienced a great chase this past Saturday, which helped bring some relief to what had been a frustrating season for myself. I intercepted the north-central Kansas supercell and observed five tornadoes near Scottsville and Jamestown, including the anticyclonic tornado that occurred while the Jamestown wedge was ongoing in the distance.

A brief summary along with my images can be found at:
http://www.onthefront.ws/may2904.htm

My full chase account can be found at:
http://www.onthefront.ws/52904ca.htm

Anticyclonic tornado near Jamestown:
8dffbd7b4d66328f26a985b717ddfe91.jpg

Jason
 
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