2015-06-04 REPORTS: CO, KS, NE, WY

[Michael Gavan]

Career Day today in Matheson Colorado. My tentative count is around 7 tornadoes, 3 of them anticyclonic. Many majestic, high contrast, and long lived. Need to review footage to confirm if there were more. I actually ran out of cards and battery before 6 pm.:/

 

[Matt Ashworth]

I was at work on a delivery (I work as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut in Firestone, CO but live in nearby Longmont) when a storm blew up on radar some 20 miles north of me and intensified in the late afternoon. It headed in a south/southwest direction and produced a nice wall/shelf cloud (hard to tell which from my vantage point at the restaurant). Very shortly after that I noticed the beginnings of a funnel while on another run and in the time it took me to enter a neighborhood, deliver the pizza, and leave the neighborhood (all of about three minutes) the funnel had fully condensed and dropped to the ground along US 287 between Longmont and Berthoud. I had a beautiful vantage point from the I-25 frontage road on my way back, but my joy at seeing a fairly large and high contrast stovepipe tornado (a first for me) when and where I least expected was overshadowed by my immediate fear that Longmont (a city of 90,000 people) was about to be struck and that my friends and family were in danger. I took what photos I could before making a few necessary phone calls, though I wish I had taken better ones.

 

[Michael Gavan]

Matheson, CO Tornado #1. Wide Angle Lapse.

 

[Bob Schafer]

As usual I cannot post my vid until I get home, but here are a bunch of vidcaps. Yes, these were all taken today. Every last one of them. Unreal day. Words fail me. edit: Oh, LOL, BTW, this was in Colorado, from Simla southward down to near CO Hwy94. I'll have to check timestamps, but I think this all took close to an hour and a half. I shot about 40 minutes of vid, and very little of it is sans tornado.

The first four are the first tornado, which lasted, what, a half hour? After they are pretty much all different tornadoes, but I can't swear to that as crazy as everything was.


I guess I'll let that be one post and then make another.

 

[Bob Schafer]

More madness. Again, these are, for the most part, all different tornadoes. Umm, maybe?

TWO AT ONCE, ONE IN FRONT OF THE OTHER:






STILL/ONCE AGAIN TWO AT ONCE:





And then finally, on the drive back to Limon:

 

[Michael Gavan]

Tornado #4 (tentatively) (~4th Cyclonic) and 1st anti-cyclonic Tornado

So, first tor lasted about half hour, it lifted and dropped at least once. Needle / Column. Then a stovepipe. Then Stovepipe got company from a cyclonic landspout. #3. Landspout lifted.. I lost that stovepipe in the rain, not sure if the one behind in this video is 4th, or the original 2nd. Then this anticyclonic tor makes either 4th or 5th.

 

[Eric Hurst]

Here is a view of the first tornado that touched down near Simla. Taken from just northwest of Ramah at an abandon building.


Taken from Highway 24 in Ramah looking east.

Two on the ground looking south from Highway 24 between Simla & Ramah


A wide view with the satellite tornado visible
The smaller tornado destroyed an outbuilding along Elbert County Road 133

 

[Stan Rose]

This was a top 5 if not top 3 day for me as well. Will take me a while to sort through all the stills, video, and lapses, but i'm sure this page will quickly fill up with photos so no one will feel deprived I watched the storm from its birth and Verne Carlson and I were almost under the first tor when it formed. Was within a stone's throw from a satellite tornado. Good to meet up with Warren Faidley and Joel Ewing, thanks to them I only entertained the notion of continuing east from Limon for about 2 seconds.

 

[joel ewing]

I do most of the driving and my chase partner/cousin Doren Berge shoots the "most excellent" video and stills, the 15 seasons he's chased with me. Forgive me for not offering any photos to back up my tornado count as I sit here dead-beat-bone-tired at the Holiday Inn Express in Limon at midnite Thurs. morning typing this quick report to share with you fellow 'Trackers. I'm sure Doren will toss some up once he gets rolling in the morning. For now, let me just say, that in 30 yrs. plus of chasing I don't think I've EVER encountered a day as prolific as this one. And like so many of you, I've seen a bunch of wild weather. Oh THANK GOD we opted to sit tight in Limon today (we spent last nite here in Limon) as Doren and I came very close to opting for the north central Kansas target. What really sealed the Limon target for us was the out-of-site near 60 dew points here today. Early this morning we ran into NOAA Pueblo office forecaster Stan Rose and my longtime chase buddy and fellow Tucsonan Warren Faidley, and had lunch across the street from the motel at that big truckstop (TA Truckstop). They turn over a LOT of food, so you get good fresh product when you eat there. At our table we kicked around the forecast, and like I said, oh man....I'm so glad we stayed put here in Limon. We watched a storm for a long time west of Limon a few miles...as it morphed and huffed and puffed and finally got it's act together. As photos will show, it finally put down several beauties to start with. Doren and I decided to then follow the storm as it went from it's initial location to areas where all we had were farm dirt / clay roads. Not surprising, there weren't too many chasers that peeled off the beaten path and kept documenting this insane storm. We kept running into Bart Comstock and Kevin Saunders

 

[Michael Gavan]

More Simla / Matheson area, CO

 

[TJKLECKNER]

Best we could find in Wyoming.... Cheyenne, WY

 

[Cammie Czuchnicki]

I've been coming to the US from the UK for the last 6 years, chasing with my boyfriend Tim and it's days like this that keep on drawing us back, although I've never had a day like today! Absolutely stunning weather courtesy of Colorado, our firm favourite State. Being limited to a rental car not equipped with particularly great traction, we usually have to stick to the paved roads which sometimes keeps us from being able to get as close as we’d like sometimes, but this time it worked out so well for us and we were able to edge into the clear slot and captured the tornado outside Simla. I have never been so close to a tornado forming and I couldn’t believe the speed of the rotation! We then retreated back in the direction of Limon and took the next paved road south and from here captured the anticyclonic tornado with the jaw dropping Rockies in the background. A fantastic day that now seems like a dream!

 

[sdienst]

Woke up in Cheyenne the morning of the 4th thinking it would be another day on the front range. Ended up making the wrong call again like too many days this year and targeted north central Kansas. Had to settle for the late evening supercells.

 

[Brett Roberts]

Departed Norman by 8:15am, meaning I technically could have made it to Simla, CO, by 4pm MDT -- a fact I may never let myself forget as long as I chase. That was easily one of the top 5 storms of the decade to-date, particularly for anyone who values photogenic over violent/destructive.

Realistically, I never even considered the CO play, though. I liked the NE/KS state line around and just W of US-81, as it seems the majority of chasers did on Thursday. Ironically, I woke up and got on the road so early to make sure I wouldn't be caught with my pants down if the 2015 mantra of early initiation struck again. We all know how that turned out. After grabbing lunch in SLN, I spent over five hours sitting idly in various spots around north-central KS. I was relatively optimistic until I watched an explosive tower somewhere around Stockton go up to 40k+ ft., then immediately get shredded in half around 700 mb. When a storm finally developed in SW NE, I was one of many who blasted W on US-36 toward a less-impressive environment, relieved simply at the renewed possibility of observing convection.

While darting W, I knew it would likely be sunset by the time I reached the evolving supercell between Imperial and McCook. In a stroke of luck that seemed unfitting for the day, that storm collapsed quickly while another took off right along our highway near Atwood. It was tornado-warned by the time I arrived, and one of the first true LP storms I've seen all year. Although it didn't amount to much before dissipating like its northern predecessor, the structure was photo-worthy for the first 20 or 30 minutes.



Again thinking I'd largely squandered a 400+ mile drive, the atmosphere graciously decided to prove me wrong for real at sunset. The borderline-LP storm which initiated SW of Oberlin showed off easily the best combination of CGs and structure I've witnessed. I photographed it for nearly an hour near and N of Selden, the constant thunder intermixed with distant cheers and screams of ecstatic chasers. If only nature could always be this kind to those who pick the wrong target.

 

[Doren Berge]