06/08/10 REPORTS: KS/CO/MO/IL

[Michael O'Keeffe]

Pretty fun local chase today! I intercepted the first storm of the day near Wellsville, KS that went supercellular for a short time before going outflow dominant near Spring Hill.

I later intercepted the tornado warned storm near Williamsburg, KS that had some of the craziest CG lightning I have ever seen! At least 50 strikes within a mile of me and at least 5-10 within a few hundred with one just about 50 feet away. The footage is crazy!! Below is a blurry image of one of the shots I got with my Nikon of the lightning but I will get the video up in a week or so as I have an early flight tomorrow morning and don't feel like messing with the footage.

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Might want to add TX to the list. Had a local chase myself with storms that fired off the cold front north of AMA. The storms tracked southwest and eventually the one in Deaf Smith County, TX put down a really low rotating wall cloud. I've never seen one that looked like this, but it was definately rotating. And I don't know whether to call it a wall cloud or a funnel, since it was just attached to the updraft base. Not too bad for a day with very minimal severe potential.

 

[John Lavin]

not a successful chase at all.

Decided to leave Lawrence once convection initiated, and headed for the cells that were located south of Kansas City, MO expecting them to become more isolated from the boundary and enter a favorable shearing environment. As it turned out nearly everything we saw was elevated junk and called it quits pretty early on.

No much lost due to the proximity of the event, but still a massive disappointment.

I will say there was plenty of lightning and rain though

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Like Michael said the lightning on the cells was intense. I grabbed the first cell that went tornado warned as it was just East of Lebo. The wall rotation was pretty good at times but never really caught on, I followed it East on 50 till about a mile West of Beto (I 35 / HWY 75) where I went north to catch it again, I kept seeing a ragged lowering that was forming and dissipating but it was hard to tell if it was rotating any until I caught up with it under the wall.



At that point it came together again with light rotation nearly making the ground but if it did I seen no evidence of it.

First shot before I stopped a bit closer was a bit motion blurred:



Shot wide @ 18mm just before it came unglued and fell apart again:



I watched from nearly underneath what was Michael's Williamsburg storm as it was getting wound up just NW of Waverly and had numerous strikes around the truck as well but chose to head back SW to a cell that was looking promising rather than follow it East.

I grabbed a bunch of lightning shots from it and ended up taking off and leaving it just behind me and had given up on it when they reported the tornado from it near Gridley, I recaptured it a few minutes later but never caught anything more than some good rotation after that.

Went back home and grabbed some of the lightning from under the front porch after that.



More on my Flickr.

 

[John Farley]

NM should probably also be added to the title thread. I really expected the best storms up around Springer, so I had to backtrack southeast big time and ended up on the wrong side of the storm. Still, the storm that backbuilt slowly southwestward from east of San Jon, NM down to the west of Clovis was probably the most intense of the group of storms in the TX panhandle and eastern NM, so the chase was not a total loss. This storm produced larger than golfball hail early on near San Jon, then later winds measured as high as 78 mph farther south in the Clovis area. Because I was coming from behind the storm, the mammatus picture comes first:

Looking south from about 15 miles south of San Jon, around the end of the time when the severe wind reports were occuring:

The best part of the storm wasn't quite where I could line it up with the wind turbines on the ridge south of San Jon, but I was still fairly happy with this:

Storms finally went up in my original target area shortly before sunset, with no SVR warnings until after sunset. More driving and less storm than I preferred, but not a total loss.

Full report will be posted to my Web site as time permits.

 

[B. Hey]

I got on this storm about 5 miles south of Garnett, Kansas. When I cleared the rain heading south this tornado warned storm was producing a funnel. I was chasing alone and by the time I found a place to pull over the funnel had dissipated. This wall cloud then developed. The storm also had some wicked cg lighting. I continued to follow this storm to the southeast to no avail