Trego County, Kansas near Trego Center ~2235z
In chasing it is often better to be lucky than good, and today I was very lucky and only good enough to avoid screwing up one of the great chase days of the last few years. June 9 deserves a place alongside the best chase days in recent memory, producing a wide range of violent, photogenic tornadoes from south of Lubbock, Texas well into Nebraska.
I witnessed four tornadoes from the storm that began in central Ness County Kansas and moved into Trego County where it wound up and developed several large cones, funnels, and stovepipe tornadoes, along with the most violent rear flank downdraft winds I've ever seen.
I started in Sterling and raced south, thinking the outflow boundary and dryline would intersect somewhere in the eastern Texas panhandle. But the surface low in southeast Kansas was ejecting faster than the 9z RUC model had shown, and my intersection point was progressing steadily northward. This was a good thing, too, because construction slowed me terribly in Colorado. If there had only been the one storm near White Deer (which did produce a tornado, according to several chasers), I would have been hard pressed to arrive in time.
I revised my target to Beaver, Oklahoma, then finally Dodge City, Kansas. I arrived at Dodge in time for the first small storm that fired ahead of the dry punch. At this time, the Hill City area storm was cranking up, and I knew my friends were up there bagging tornadoes like a shopping spree. My little cell by Dodge died rapidly, and I noticed the storm two counties north, in Ness County, was shaping up nicely. I hurried back up 183 and intercepted this storm about ten minutes before it began exhibiting rapid rotation---the most violent cloud base rotation I have ever seen. It spun and spun and I was amazed that such a violently turning storm was not condensing or even building downward. Then suddenly everything changed.
As the storm snagged the boundary, it began rapidly updrafting new condensation, and the show was on. The first and second tornadoes are so remarkably similar at one stage of their lives, it's nearly impossible to tell them apart, with the perfect collar cloud orbiting each. But the second tornado morphed into a large elephant trunk that touched down ~2240z and began to cross the road in front of me. This was about ten miles south of Wakeeney on 283, very near Trego Center, Kansas. This tornado was on the ground for nearly fifteen minutes. Then it lifted and another came down--not the same funnel; clearly separate post-occlusion tornadoes. This one began moving to the east northeast and I was behind, since I had allowed the tornado to cross the road in front of me. Unfortunately, my camera was zoomed all the way out and so my video makes it look as if I was further from the tornado than I was. Not that it matters, but it was so breathtaking that I stopped shooting digital stills at one point and stared in awe. I like doing that once in a while. The obsession with recording this stuff can sometimes interfere with the actual experience. It's good to put the cameras down for a few seconds and humble yourself before something so majestic.
I called Dodge City NWS to report the tornado (I had cell service for once!). Then as I turned east to follow, a large RFD plume was roiling in the field ahead of me. Then I observed an area of flattened vegetation moving rapidly, with some of the vegetation being pulled out of the ground and flung through the air! This was RFD--there's no question. But it was particularly violent and I turned south to escape and took the next east option. Strange as this sounds, that RFD was more unnerving than any of the tornadoes, including the one not far from me.
When I rounded the corner again, a white cone tornado was still on the ground. This was either the third tornado which had never lifted or simply a new one. After this, a new mesocyclone to the west produced another brief tube, and the show was over. The storm elongated and the shear weakened. Amazing what can happen in about four hours.
Special thanks today to EricN and ScottB for comparing notes on the forecast, and congrats to those guys for the getting the best of BOTH storms, Hill City and Trego County.
We have heard reports of damage to homes and property and hope the residents of northern Kansas made it through this dangerous night safely.
