2014-05-10 REPORTS: KS, MO

[Taylor Wright]

Quite an interesting and somewhat successful day from a forecasting standpoint after racking my brain on where to target. Left Paola, KS around 1 pm and headed up to KC, wondering whether we should stay there or go north to catch the stuff going on east of St. Joseph. Despite backed winds up there, moisture was very marginal with dews struggling to get above the 50s. Also, short range models were consistent in showing enhanced low-level shear just east of KC, so we decided to stay put for a bit. Towers were blowing up off to our west, but struggled to get organized until about 4 pm. I was impressed with how accurate the HRRR was at forecasting storm initiation. All day it had shown initiation just east of KC around 4 pm. Well, that's exactly what happened, almost within ten minutes.

We had followed some small updrafts trying to get going all the way east to Lexington, MO, when we noticed that wasn't going to produce and things started blowing up in the KCMO area, so we headed back west. There were initially two cells, with the northernmost looking the most promising. Both cells were moving very slow, so we had plenty of time to decide which one we wanted to get on. Went for the northern one, but as soon as we got on it the southern cell started to blow up. Road networks are terrible over there if you're trying to move in a straight line or in any economically feasible manner, so we struggled to get down to the southern cell without killing ourselves in the process. We were going to core punch through the front of it until it developed strong rotation seemingly instantly so we decided to try to circle around the back end of it. Still, we managed to get stuck in golf ball hail in the process while denting up Luke's car. I swear this thing completely stopped at one point and laughed at us. Finally, we caught up with some other chasers and were able to get a decent view of the wall cloud that was rotating pretty violently. At this point, it had already dropped the tornado that ripped through Orrick and didn't want to drop another one until shortly before dark, after we had already headed home. Didn't catch a tornado, but my forecast verified pretty well and for a noob this is a big deal on a messy setup like today's.

Tried to stop by Orrick on the way back to help with clean up, but they "had more people to help than they had space in the town", so police weren't letting anyone in. This is a good thing, obviously, and apparently no one was injured.

 

[Jeremy Jones]

I stated the day out in far Northern Oklahoma watching the initial CU field go up on the state line. Went into KS and started heading East on US166 to Arkansas City, to Winfield, KS then to Burden, KS. That is about where I left the first storm go and die out, while the second storm behind it became the main play. From Burden KS, I continued North to just a mile or two South of Atlanta, KS. where most of my decent photography, and footage was shot. There was one point while driving East that I looked over my left shoulder to see a cigar shaped funnel spinning in the RFD notch. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to safely pull over and start filming again it was gone. One thing I've never seen before is Anticyclonic spin coming off of the Southern side of the base, as the RFD is slamming into it. Here's a still I shot at that point. As well as my GoPro Footage. One of the coolest things I've seen on a storm in a while!

Watch video >

Here's some more stills from yesterday...

 

[Dan Robinson]

I sat near Kingdom City, MO for about an hour, waiting to see if anything would come of the cumulus field in central MO roughly from Sedalia to south of St. Louis. When this area lost any hope of firing, I jumped on the storm moving out of KC and caught it in Lexington. Witnessed a funnel-less tornado under a violently rotating wall cloud in Lexington and then a large wedge north of Marshall as the storm crossed back over the warm front.

http://stormhighway.com/blog2014/may1114a.php

 

[Jeff Duda]

Played the same storms Jeremy did, although I spent the entire time on the eastern/forward flank. I sat in one spot on KS-99 just south of the intersection with US 400 for probably 30-45 minutes watching that storm slowly come at me. It kept producing shallow wall clouds, but nothing ever came close to producing as far as I could tell. I drove back and forth along a 10-15 mile stretch of US 400 around this area for probably 3 hours as one storm would come at me, pushing me east, then would die, so I come back west, and repeat. I never saw anything that looked like a tornado. Enjoyed the terrain and relatively open roads, though.

Not sure if this got reported as a tornado or not, but it looked like scud from my vantage point:

 

[Lane Pearman]

Sat at US 400 and Haverhill road and had eyes on the storm which had produced a few reports of wall clouds in the Atlanta and Latham areas. The wall cloud was clearly visible but appeared to be a bit high. We shot east on 400 and positioned ourselves just to the southeast of Beaumont where we waited for about 20 minutes. That cell passed to our east but a second more photographic cell was approaching from the southwest. It showed amazing structure as it came into view just over the top of the wind farm. Eventually moved east as the hail started to fall and ended up south of US 400 and K99 as we waited for it to approach. Finished the evening with the brief rope tornado that formed north of 400 just west of Severy. Unfortunately the 11-16 mm I was sporting was a bit to wide to capture it, which was too bad since it was bathed in pink light from the setting sun.

 

[James Hilger]

I was South of Severy, Ks. Gorgeous structure on both storms. About the one minute mark you can see the storm in the background getting more organized, which produced the brief tornado. The youtube video was shot with my streaming cams, so not the best quality. Last clip of the video is of the 2nd storm. I'll edit it better when I get more time to go through all my footage. They both took on a beautiful mothership like shape. http://youtu.be/BM5tL1c0bVw

 

[Scott Sims]

Watch video >

I left home from Southern Illinois about 9:30 Saturday Morning and drove to the North side of Kansas City on I-435 and waited for storms. While waiting to see how things unfolded, I almost went for the storm that formed in Northeast KS early on, but it seemed it was going to be too far north of the warm front to be interesting. Then just as I thought I couldn't wait any longer, a cell began to fire on the south side of the Metro. I waited for a couple more radar scans and saw it was starting to get lightning and hoped that it would have the best shot of latching onto the warm front and putting on a show.

Once I saw the trajectory, I went back down to Independence, and saw that I had to decide which roads to use to follow the storm. Given the expected course along the boundary, it was fairly clear this thing was going to hug the Missouri River the whole way. So, you can take the road on the north side and go in and out of the path of the meso, and if it makes any right turn, you will possibly be trapped between the river and either the path of a tornado or maybe just a hail core. After running the gauntlet of El Reno and also getting run over in Tuscola, IL last November, I decided I could watch it from the other option on the South side of the river and follow along from US-24. Thankfully, it wasn't always rain wrapped, so this was a valid visual position on this particular storm, much of the time. After Lexington, it went into a reorganization phase. I lagged a bit behind and when it started to ramp up again for the Marshall tornado, I was a bit too far southwest and the gusty wet outflow of the southern RFD made me decide not to try and make a play at dusk. At that point, I bailed out and went back to I-70, headed back to St Joseph to stage for the next day.

 

[Brett Roberts]

Chased with Daniel Betten and Curtis McDonald. We left around 2pm to head up I-35 and made it to Wellington in time to get on the first supercell of the day in S KS. It quickly petered out after dropping 2" hail that we came up behind, and we briefly wondered whether we should just start looking at motel options for Sunday's chase. However, new initiation SE of ICT rapidly strengthened, and we approached an incipient supercell at Atlanta, KS, around 5:30pm. Over the next three hours, a parade of sculpted supercells would train over the same corridor (roughly Atlanta to Howard), providing some of the best non-tornadic photo ops one could ask for.

First storm (5:30-7:00pm):

Note in the last shot above that you can already see the well-developed base of the next supercell in the distance!

The second storm which tracked over the same area between 7-9pm offered slightly different, but equally impressive, updraft structure.

Up to this point at sunset, it had been one of my favorite supercell photography days in a couple years, and at least a good first step in easing the pain of 2014 thus far. Unfortunately, as the updraft base overtook us we decided to reposition well to the SE (on the gravel road E out of Howard) and abandoned the spot on KS-99 at which we'd been loitering for over an hour. As soon as we did, the highly-occluded tornado reported elsewhere occurred relatively near that spot. Photographing and videoing this brief/weak, but nicely-colored, tornado at sunset would have made this a truly spectacular day. Alas, it was not to be; I was shooting distant structure shots such as the following at the time, and didn't even notice the funnel until after the fact. It can be seen in the extreme distance below, right above the left edge of the big grove of trees.

Highly-occluded tornado-producing mesocyclones have been a nemesis of mine for years, and I never seem to learn. Unfortunately, when the day has been a structure bonanza and previous storm cycles all day haven't looked anywhere close to producing, it's tough to make yourself stay right under the base. For me, anyway.

Even despite the late blunder, this was a great day and easily my favorite of the year so far. Which, of course, doesn't say much.

 

[Joshua Nall]

Left South Arkansas around 8 am or so and cumulus clouds were already building South of Wichita by the time I got to Tulsa. I headed on over to East of Wichita somewhere and let the first storm that had popped pass as it weakened. After this I made short jogs here and there trying to get the best position on storms as they intensified and trained. This first photo is looking south at a meso passing to my south. A bit of a lowering developed, and even a small funnel at one point. Three girls drove up in a truck about the time the second photo was taken and were asking if they should be concerned about that twisty thing. They were going fishing and drove on down to their pond as small hail began to fall.







I tried to get some lightning in the frame on the next storm, but the next photo is about best I could get with daytime lightning. I really don't remember many cgs and the ones I did see were further up under the anvil precip. This storm just kept looking more and more impressive as a rain shaft appeared to dump right out of the center of the base. Made for a classic looking "the aliens are landing" photo.






This was the begginning of the rfd coming in and busting it all up. I stayed and watched the occlusion process for a while and noted the low hanging cylindrical mass of clouds that was virtually rain free spin to the north, thinking it would go poof..... Well a few miles down the road I happened to look back, and it had tightened up and was rotating better, so I stopped and watched it. Eventually a funnel developed at the base and it snaked on down to the ground. First tornado of the year! It quickly roped out and vanished.







The color on these is accurate... might have been a bit brighter. After this I caught a couple more cells for some lightning.

 

[Sean Mullen]

I also chased eastern KS this day. Wandered east of Wichita, saw storms go up on radar. Headed west on 54, then south on 99 to 400. Stopped for gas near Severy and noticed what seemed to be a base to my SW:

 

[Sean Mullen]

5/10/14 continued

I headed south on 99 and was rewarded with this about 25 minutes later, which looked promising

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Headed west on Road 86(also marked, ominously, as Crisco Road). This was about 9 miles west of 99. Despite its name, Crisco road was good travelling, just pebbly, couldn't go faster than about 35 without stones hitting the undercarriage. Here is that scud Jeff was talking about; I did not hear any warnings for it. The wind farm was probably a little nervous, though.

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Back at 99 / 400. Still trying to tighten up, here is the mothership, with a searchlight, and a periscope. I believe James is to my left, parked just a few yards away next to that car in view.

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Followed by a little lightning in the area of the inflow to the right. One thing I noticed was that I was feeling warm inflow, and then 20-30 seconds later it was cool inflow, and then back to warm again20-30 seconds later. This happened several times.

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Nice sculpting here. I had wondered why Brett's shot looked so much like mine.

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I love this shot. If you can zoom in, you can see that the guy with the trailer has his backup lights on. Good call.

After a while, I headed west on Crisco/86 again, for about 5 miles.

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Almost looked like a funnel was trying to form over me, so I figured it was time to go before Crisco Road lived up to its name.

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Headed south on 99 for structure shots, then turned around south of Howard and headed north again. Had most of my stuff put away, when I saw the short-lived tornado I just had time to grab my cell and capture it with that.

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I headed back to 400 and headed west back to Wichita. I stopped off 400 several miles west of Piedmont for lightning shots; I think this is the same bolt Jeff posted.

Overall, the best day of my vacation this year. Spent most of the chasing time actually sitting still and just watching the storm. Chased the Fairmont, NE storm the next day but only caught a possible glimpse of Beaver Crossing from a few miles away at the 6 / 13 intersection.