06-15-2009 REPORTS: CO, KS, NE, OK

[Verne Carlson]

Tornado #1 southeast of Elbert, CO 19:41z - on the ground an estimated 12 minutes!

Tornado #2 20:11z

Tornado #4 orbited tornado #3 (not pictured) for a moment. 20:19z

3 solid cone tornadoes plus a satellite orbit on one in Elbert county CO today!
Thanks to Michael for nowcasting me to these!

>> Full Report Here <<

 

[Scott Hammel]

Was on the same monster as Verne (although his shots are way better!) and witnessed two of the three amazing cone tornadoes in Elbert County today. I did manage to get the cone with satellite on video but I was pretty far back. Road network out there killed me. I need to look into one of these nowcaster types of people I keep hearing about...Anyway, also caught a nice funnel and wall cloud just west of Limon as well. Then I got hailed on in Limon and called it a day. Full post with pics and video will be up on my blog later tonight. Great day!
Here's a video grab just after the main cone tornado lifted but the satellite was still on the ground:

 

[Michael O'Keeffe]

Intercepted the El Dorado, KS storm near Eureka and watched it do pretty much nothing except spit out tons of CG and some OK structure. Will post some lightning pics later. We are in a severe warning here for winds of 80 to 90 MPH!

 

[edward oneal]

KS

Got on the first storm that fired north of Dodge, and stayed with it to Kinsley. Saw strong rotation north of Dodge with white not well defined funnel very close to the ground then many more funnels all the way to Kinsley. South of Kinsley looked like a very large tornado was on the ground or very close to it. Have not heard at this time if that has been confirmed yet. So going that far east, I was out of position to see the tornadoes that hit near Dodge. Here are pictures of what I did see.

 

[Patrick Romans]

I chased the Butler County storm as well, actually my wife 8 year old son's idea as I was almost too tired to leave the house. We left Eureka and headed southwest on county roads until we could see clearly to the west. From about 5 miles out I could see the base and a broadly rotating wall cloud in the area near Rosalia. As we headed west to intercept we noticed a large stovepipe tornado emerge from behind the precip curtain. Watched the tornado creeping north east slowly for about 5 minutes before it roped out just south of Highway 54. We continued to follow that cell as long as it remained TOR warned near the Madison area. The storm maintained a decent wall cloud almost the entire time and continued to produce numerous short lived funnels. All in all a fantastic chase less than 15 miles from home, bagged my wife and son their first tornado ever and got my first tornado of the 2009 season.

 

[Skip Talbot]

Adam Lucio and I intercepted the supercell that tracked from near Dodge City to Kinsley, KS and onward. We missed the rain wrapped cone that Dick McGowan reported on Spotter Network after we got cored, however, we had a great chase none the less:

Coming in from the north to see a wall cloud underway as the storm goes tornado warned:

Exquisite colors in the core of this storm:

West of Kinsely on 50 it looked the storm was gusting out pretty hard. We saw an awesome gustnado form just to our south. There seemed to be multiple vorticies inside of it that rotating around the larger circulation. We also believe we saw rotation in the base above and the dust did extend all the way up, but I don't think I can say it was a full fledge tornado:

Another more tubular gustnado spun up behind it moments later:

We took a wrong turn in Kinsely though and wound up getting cored. We fell behind and dropped south, and then after surviving that we stupidly decided to sample the core again. Two inch hail:

Lots of fun though and a nice end to our three day run to the plains.

 

[Jason McKittrick]

Was not able to chose my target today. This was more of a chase of convenience. Chased the cluster of cells in the NE Texas panhandle. I enjoyed the solitude after last weeks circus. My chase partner Don and I were the first chasers on the NE Texas cells. The storms had great structure but again struck out on tornadoes which has so often been the case this year. Below are my photos from today's chase. The first cell seemed to get choked off by the second two storms on it's SW flank, however I was a little surprised when the tail end charlie went from a beautiful classic supercell with a funnel and rotation to a dying LP storm. I suspect it must have been the lack of Storm low level inflow and convergence.

First storm in Ochiltree county

These last pictures are of the tail end storm which spotters reported a touchdown with. The top picture shows a funnel that was rotating at the time, however due to our location we could not confirm a touchdown.

 

[Adam Lucio]

Skip nailed our account of the chase pretty well, this definitely was a huge, HP monster that required you to be in the cage if you wanted to see anything.

Once we fell behind we also noted quite a bit of damage around, some grain silos completely destroyed with sheet metal in the road, downed powerlines, lots of tree debris, including a huge branch that emerged suddenly from the blinding rains, quick reactions saved us from potential disaster there. All captured on film.

I have some really good footage that will make an excellent gustnado/tornado debate. In fact, if the storm didnt appear to be gusting out I would not even be second guessing myself. It is not the one Skip posted above but one shortly later, what appears to be another gustnado is swirling on the ground, suddenly a narrow lowering, which appeared to be rotating extends down directly above it, at the same time the swirls on the ground strengthen rapidly but there never was full visible connection. Will have to review it better and wait for other chaser accounts though.

A very exciting chase, ended with the most amazing display of mammatus Ive ever seen. Full log with pics and videos will be up in a couple days. Congrats to those who bagged some good tubes. A great way to end the season!!!

 

[Mikey Gribble]

I was on the same storm as Skip. It was the lead cell of three storms that fired north of Dodge City.

We were ahead of the storm and stopped and watched it slowly get organized (I swear it almost stalled while it did this, I know it turned right), developing inflow bands, cycling through lowerings and then it finally got a good lowering with a tail cloud and the storm started moving again to the east southeast.

The storm put on a show as it crossed highway 50 with good vertical motion and a littl roation (nothing organized) in kind of an elongated updraft. Cars were stopping so it obviously looked to pretty intimidating to them. I wouldn't have driven under it if I were a regular person. Speaking of which we did see a semi truck and several cars flipped in the dithc during the day and some damage to a farmhouse with downed powerlines.
The drivers were all OK.

Here is where the fun begins. We get on back roads obviously after the storm cuts south of 50. Well there's some damn creek you can't get across so you are screwed on way or another. You could either go north around the creek and get back on it after the creeks, go south around it and meet back up with it, or ride it out to the creek and see what happens. We opted for the latter becuase we were doing a lot of live streaming back to the station and the storm did look like it had tornado potential.

As we headed south the storm produced several small gustnadoes. I only mean small in diamater. Some of them were actually pretty decent. I was betting it was just a matter of time unti one of them got called in. We saw these are were were driving south, we then turned back to the east to stiair step along with the storm. As we began heading east you could tell that the inflow portion of the storm had become quite powerful and we knew we had to get up there for a closer look because a lot of dust was blocking our view. I will post a picture tomorrow, but the area in question was a few miles south of Offerly or 6-8 miles southwest Kinsley.

There was a lot of dust getting picked up under the old mesocyclon and no it wasn't outflow. I saw plent of dust getting kicked out from gust fust today too. The thing that immediately came to mind was the Hallam tornado. This looked like an occluded meso on the storm and had the white kind of skirt cloud around it with a dusty base underneath just like the Hallam tornado did when it was getting started.
We tired driving north to get as close as we could and got decent video, but by the time we got there it looks like there is a funnel in the middle of the mesocyclone that is about half way to the ground. When we originally spotted it through the haze my chase partners thought it was all the way down. This probably wouldn't have just been a spinup. If this was a tornado I imagine it would have lasted a few minutes at least because that outer skirt cloud was rapidly rotating and like I said the funnel was nicely centered in the middle of it so it didn't look like some sloppy funnel that just sprung up.
I can understand nobody reporting it too beccause we were on the last roads before the river. we had to let the storm go and it did tornado on the other side of the river. Our strategy for chasing that storm was extremely dumbe if you wanted to stay on it, but we didn't. We went all the way up to the creek that divided us from the awaiting chasers on the other side.

I called the Dodge City NWS to discuss this, but I don't know if it will be taken seiously. I am really interested in resolving whether or not this was a tornado. I was never close enough to make out any sort of rotation on the funnel appendage and it was too dusty too see in well, but by just going off the skirt cloud around it the speed of the rotation had to of been enough to translate that funnel to the ground I'd think.

If there is anybody from the DDC office like Umscheid or anybody else that could help answer this questionI'd appreciate any help I can get. The guy I talked to tonight said he would call me back but I doubt he will. He didn't sound like he was too enthusiastic about it lol.

Anyway, after that we dropped down caught the southern storm and then called it a day and headed home.

 

[Jim Saueressig]

Long story short, I went to Marion County and convinced myself I needed to go North and then East so when stuff started to fire near Wichita it was way behind. I split the Butler County And Marion County storm down the middle getting back on the business end of them and got cored by the Butler cell because ICT was down and I didn't notice at first. Ended up pushing through Cassoday and seen the wall on the North cell and went and grabbed it. People were piled under every spot at the Florence gas station which meant a 20 minute delay getting gas which ruined the rest of the day for the most part, There was no catching up after that. I ended up in Madison for their tornado warning and came home to damage everywhere. Hit three downed trees in total getting home in the massive winds and rain.

Hit these while still traveling. You can see the chasers and the funnel in the first. The walls rotation was real nice.






Stopped to shoot it with the 10mm, funnel is still visible.



And wrapped up it goes.



EDIT 4:30 AM: More cells moving through gave a great lightning show. I seen a strike hit what I believe was Lebo that must have flashed 15 times and lasted 4-5 seconds which when done left a hell of a power flash and a much darker Lebo.

More on my Flickr:

 

[Greg McLaughlin]

What an awesome day! After looking at the pics from the other reports today, I think we were on the verge of having a significant regional tornado outbreak today. I'm not sure what we were lacking....maybe better helicity since we didn't have a really good surface low. Whatever wasn't in place kept these awesome storms from being epic.

Justin Teague and I, along with Charlie the Storm Chasing Beagle intercepted the supercell east of Wichita. This storm was very explosive. Justin commented how this was the most explosive storm he had wintessed since the Hallam, NE supercell (5-22-04). This supercell went from nothing to a monster (65+dbz) in just four volume scans!

The structure on this storm was awesome. It appeared as a sculpted LP/calssic hybrid. The meso was completly free from the precip core for most of the storm's life. Around 6:45 we saw the first tornado from 1/2 to one mile away. I believe the tornado wasn't far from El Dorado, KS. This tornado was a nice cone which formed with the occluding meso to the northwest while a new meso developed behind us to the southeast. This tornado was brief and probably an EF0. We could hear the roar of the tornado which was quite awesome.

As this tornado lifted and the meso weakened, the rfd punched in and cleared the base of the storm between the two mesos to reveal the massive updraft directly above us shooting up 50K+!!!! This was a breathtaking sight. In fact the updraft tower was so tall I was leaning back just to see it as I was looking up. The next tornado briefly formed just to our south and the second meso quickly occluded. The thrid meso produced a nice white needle tornado. Justin captured the ground circulation on video as well as the rope stage above us. After this the storm became more disorganized and
failed to produce any more tornadoes. This was a fun chase, and while the tornadoes didn't come close to our best footage it was still a nice consolation prize to an otherwise crappy tornado season. I will get some video stills up once I get the video copied.

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

Chased the storms that moved across the NE TX Panhandle this evening. Started the day in Trinidad, CO trying to fix a flat tire on a trailer and finished the day watching some of the best looking storms I have seen in years. I saw a couple of very low wall clouds from about a county away (when there was a confirmed touchdown). By the time I got closer, it was an all structure show.

Picture from Canadian @ 6:13 looking NW

Picture from N of Canadian @ 6:34 looking north

Picture from OK/TX border north of Darrouzett, TX @ 8:09

 

[Dustin Wilcox]

Extremely exciting day, filmed a couple tornadoes, one rather large SE of Kinsley. Lots of gustnadoes as has been mentioned, everything was littered with dust, though I am certain of at least 2 legit tornadoes. I found myself in an intense situation as tree'S (full size) fell around me as a intense small circulation passed over, boxing me in as a weak tornado moved down the road towards me (200 yards away), made for some pretty intense video, first time I've had to abandon the car and locate the nearest ditch. Should have an account (including video) done late tomorrow evening...

 

[D. Hayes]

Did anyone happen to get photos of the early morning tornado that happened around 2am in Cowley county?

I believe I have some but it's from a good 20 or so miles away. I was taking photos on 47th street between Rock Rd and Greenwich and found the lightening illuminating some really tight rain bands when my weather radio kicked on with the tornado warning. I think my photos are of it developing but the long exposure didn't help with the sharpness. I need to resize the photos and get them online in the morning for some expert opinions and I'll get that done first thing after I get off work.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Chased the tornadic supercell west of Hastings this evening, after waking up in the badlands...after a whopping 50 minutes of "sleep". Wanted nothing more than to just go home. That was the plan, long story. Anyway wound up in sc NE giving up on the area about 6 or 7 times. If I had to sit somewhere I'd quickly want to fall asleep, so I kept "starting for home" but development would lure me back to chasing. Long story short, got a rather large tornado and my best structure of the year.

The storm stopped moving north then moved se and was a machine, with a ball tipped hook at times. The large(wedge?) tornado it produced actually was one of those "detached" jobbers where the thing is forming well west of the new meso. I of course was repositioning further east after being right with it, and only got some glimpses between hills. Quite annoying to "blow" that part, but whatever I guess. Got some "neato" short vid grabs of the thing. Sounds like it was rather neat from a better angle and closer, where it turned into the same size as the occluded meso/updraft creating the thing.

Before that it had really nice structure as it spun away trying to produce. Then after the big tornado it again had great structure including dual fat tail clouds going east forever.

Sounds like a lot was happening today. Very little mention of this storm, which was rather classic for a good while on Hasting's radar. Southeast moving supercell for a good 3 hours or more.