2012-04-12 Reports: KS/NE/OK/TX

[Dan Robinson]

Targeted Oakley today after a marathon drive from STL at 11PM last night after work. Watched two storms cross the differential heating boundary/warm front north of Atwood. Both had nice barrel updraft structure before crossing the boundary. It was cool and foggy north of the boundary, so these storms didn't have a chance to do much once they crossed.

Today never had the feel of a tornado day - too cold and dry from the start. Running into many familar faces and seeing Plains storms made it a good day.

A couple of photos and a quickly-rushed panorama:
http://stormhighway.com/blog2012/april1212a.shtml

In Colby for the night.

EDIT: I'm in Ryan's first photo below from Brewster, silver Ranger at far right.

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Well we played it safe. We took a little cruise up to Canadian, TX, hoping the NE panhandle/W OK would fire. But subsidence really killed off any development today. We had a brief time for some robust towers go up east of Wheeler, TX. The towers laid over and dissolved rather quickly. We were at least treated to a beautiful sunset near Wheeler.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

I targeted Garden City, KS today, but stopped short in Scott City and eventually drifted north all the way to Goodland. I spent a couple of hours in Brewster along with a few other chasers being underwhelmed:

Ran into Doug Raflick, which was quite cool, since he shot one of my favorite storm photos ever (this one. After waiting forever, I eventually gave up and chased after the least unpromising storm to pass Goodland. It was pretty at times and highly sheared:

It got really pretty after sunset and during dusk northwest of Atwood -- I wish I had a shot of this lit by the sun, but as far as I can tell it didn't take on this lovely shape until the sun was gone:

Not sure if this awesome structure was visible or not closer to the storm -- when I tried to get closer, I ran into low-level clouds feeding into the storm, obscuring the view. If someone was up close with a good view of this little guy when it looked like this, I'm thinking we're going to see some truly amazing photos posted in here by tomorrow.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

My report: Drove to Canadian. Waited in Canadian, selected since it gave us opportunities to play both the southern dryline bulge and the section of the dryline as far north as southwestern KS. No dice. We dropped south towards Wheeler around 7-730 pm when there were several nice "clumps" of agitated Cu and occasional TCu, but those never really took hold. Save for a couple of turkey towers, all of the nice clumps got to about the same height before dissipating, indicating to me that there may have been a relatively stable layer aloft (perhaps a CAPE robber caused by some subsidence in the right exit region of the jet streak that was nosing through CO and into western KS and the panhandles). I suspect the clouds hung around just a little too long today. At least the activity along the OK/TX panhandle border seemed to be very close to fully initiating, as all of the 18z model guidance (and mid-later afternoon RUC runs) forecast. I'm not really sure I'd call it a "cap bust" -- the 00z DDC sounding had a convective temp of ~68 F, and it was 70-75F a little W and S of DDC. The 700-850 mb temps may have been a bit higher to the W and S, but I suspect the problem was primarily one of a lack of sustained low-level convergence and/or some afternoon subsidence that didn't leave the area early enough. Some thickening cirrus (indicative of some upward motion / lift aloft) overrode the dryline around 00z, but that was too little too late.

 

[Jenn Brindley]

Generally, the day was quite a disappointment. Drove down from Chicago / area with Skip Talbot and Brad Goddard. Initial target of Dodge City - we jumped from cell to cell - observing some decent structure and some photogenic skies, but that was it. Despite some very low storms, they just didn't want to produce for us.

~Jenn


Full blog post and images can be found here: http://www.thefaceofastorm.com/2012/04/april-12th-2012-kansas.html

Full blog post and images can be found here: http://www.thefaceofastorm.com/2012/04/april-12th-2012-kansas.html

 

[Brett Nickeson]

Like many others, Chris Allington and I initially targeted the Garden City area to wait for the dryline storms to approach us. After sitting around a little bit, it became clear that nothing was going to fire so we headed north where storms were already in progress. From around 20 miles away, we could see one cell's updraft in particular just explode north of I-70. We got behind it north of Brewster as it was already beginning to die. It did, however, have a beautiful rotating updraft that was being pulled tighter and tighter as the updraft was stretched away. Other than that though, it was a pretty disappointing day to what initially looked like a fine setup.

 

[Dan Robinson]

I finished my chase account/imagery for the 12th:

http://stormhighway.com/april122012.shtml

 

[Skip Talbot]

Took me awhile to recover the video, but here's a timelapse of my chase up in northwest Kansas and just across the border into Nebraska with Jennifery Brindley Ubl and Brad Goddard. Some gorgeous convection on an LP storm, a pretty sunset, and creepy low updraft base at dusk, but no tornadoes:

Watch video >

 

[Skip Talbot]

Full log write up, stats, video, pictures courtesy Jennifer Brindley Ubl, and map of our LP chase in northwest Kansas:
http://skip.cc/chase/120412/