2018-05-19 Reports TX/OK/KS

[Todd Lemery]

Please forgive my lack of quality pictures. Not that it would make a huge difference, but I’m just using what little I have on my phone. We left Hayes about 10:45 am targeting just North of Emporia KS. Watched one cell pop up, slowly start to build strength and then slowly start to die. Grabbed lunch at Subway in Osage City as a new cell popped up where the last on died. Like the first storm, this one was linear right off the bat. It developed three segments. The last in line died, so we caught up to the second in line to watch that one die. The last cell did a left/right split followed by the left split dying shortly before the remaining cell gave up. We sat on the road for a while before calling it a day and heading to Overland Park. That was the only picture I could add. That was as the first storm was popping up. I couldn’t add any others because it said the file was too large for the server..

 

[Ethan Schisler]

I chased Saturday as my 3rd chase of 2018. I targeted Topeka, KS leaving my house in Western Illinois around 7am. I got to Cameron, MO around lunch-time and I honestly debated about just turning home (first time I would have ever done that on a chase). However there was a large area of clearing to the west with a CU field going up in Northeast Kansas. I knew there was an outflow boundary down in Northeast Oklahoma, however due to time I couldn't make it down there as storms were already going near I-35 and would likely grow upscale as they moved east. Storms eventually went up in Northeast KS near Emporia and I managed to get on a severe warned cell near Emporia. I documented little to no severe weather, didn't even take my camera out of the bag as they storms managed to die as they approached Lawrence. I hopped on the interstate and headed for home arriving back home around midnight. I got a pretty good sunset on the way home east of Cameron with some anti-crepuscular rays and mammatus (off camera to the left). Therefore this was my only shot of the day:

A bust if there ever was one, but I had low expectations going into this chase especially after looking at data around lunch in Cameron. Very little low level shear was showing up and some subsidence as well as that morning MCS overworked the low levels of the atmosphere. This looks like it was my last chase of May unless something surprise pops up.

 

[Dan Robinson]

My original target for this day was northeast Kansas, but when morning data revelaed that was toast, I went down to the outflow boundary on the KS/OK border. I got on a storm at Parsons on the OFB that went quickly linear, and stayed ahead of it to Springfield, MO.

My final chase account for this day, with photos, video and a GPS track is here:

http://stormhighway.com/blog2018/may19log.php

 

[Alex Elmore]

Like many others, I too targeted northern/northeastern KS. We initially targeted Salina, KS as a point to fuel up and check out the models to see where to go from there. The outflow boundary surging to the south/southeast toward the KS-OK border was a decent target, but we didn't want to venture down there for several reasons. We held our ground hoping for our target area to produce something, but nothing happened other than a pathetic looking cu field and an occasional blip on radar. We pushed east to keep up with the front and wait for something to happen. Storms did form near Emporia, KS, but didn't look too promising. As we were sitting near I-70 and Highway 99, we could see the western-most updraft of this line of storms and decided to venture out for a better look. We caught this updraft right before it evaporated into nothing:


Around this time, the other two cells became more discrete and at least one of them was severe warned as they tracked northeastward. We drove east to try to intercept these, as they were the only game in the area, but they too quickly fell apart. Seeing as it was late and there weren't any promising signs of storm development in the area, we began the drive home to St. Louis on I-70. Roughly an hour east of Kansas City, we were greeted with a beautiful display of sunset-lit mammatus on the backside of the line that was pushing through southern MO. I'm having difficulties uploading the corresponding photo, so you can either take my word for it, or check out my page for this event: www.thunderheadscenicphotography.com/may-19-2018-log.html