5/1/08 REPORTS: IA/SD/NE/KS/MO/OK

[Corey Sloan]

Stayed close to home today and chased with Mark Hill...we felt the parameters would come together in NW MO and NE KS, not quite like SE KS but worthwhile to stay home with gas prices the way they are. Watched the storms fire in NE KS and they initially appeared discrete in front of the dryline but began to become more linear as they crossed the Missouri River. One storm that was in Platte County, MO began to show a right turn and developed a pronounced inflow notch on GRLevel 3. We positioned our selves to the southeast of this storm and saw a well defined wall cloud with signigicant rotation....WFO in Pleasant Hill Tornado warned the cell about the same time as we found a better vantage point....the vortex quickly became rain wrapped and difficult to discern...got some video but have not had a good chance to review it yet.....no initial reports of damage...but a lot of reports of funnels / tornadoes with this storm as it moved NE...it remained tornado warned for two counties to our east....chased the squall line that moved through early Friday morning with Chris Rice, Steve Polley and Stoney Bowers....an impressive squall line with tornado/hurricane forced winds....a lot of damage in and around the KC Metro Area......wind gusts up to 82 mph were reported as the line passed through Independence, MO on the east side of KCMO....

 

[George Grant]

NW Iowa too late

I took off up I29 and made it to Sioux City for a quick bite and gas. Thought I'd stay on I29 north to catch the show to the west. Saw the towers to my NE as I got to Elk Point. Took that exit and zig-zagged through Richland to Westfield and up IA12. Made a critical mistake in Hawarden as I chose to go north instead of east on IA10 to K30. Finally ended up at K30 miles east of Hudson, SD. Made it to Rock Valley as the show had already ended. I believe everyone in Rock Valley that owned a car was driving said car. I blew by Waldo somewhere in that congestion. Someone called my cell as I was in Rock Valley and then said he had the wrong number. Hey, I'm a nice guy. I'll chat with anyone as long as I'm not "white-knuckling" through big hail! Drove to my Sister-in-law's place in Sioux Falls for the night.

And, some valuable lessons from this trip to NW Iowa.

--Darrin, it really does suck to chase while sick (flu). I stopped in Sioux City for a hotdog, and threw it out the window after two bites. Ugh.
--One cannot drive fast enough to a storm. I swear I got to a point where I was maybe ten minutes behind DeWald and I didn't see a thing even through binoculars. I could see the towers and murky lowerings as I passed through Lebanon, but no soup for me.
--Don't get off the boat in the Westfield-Akron-Chatsworth corridor. The handoffs between Sprint, USCellular, and Verizon signals wasn't pretty. My Sprint phone didn't get anything--as is customary for this carrier in this region. My Alltel data card was doing a jig between one bar and five every half mile or so--even with Gordon's amp.
--This should be one of the twelve steps: Do not doubt your initial target (if you've learned anything about weather). I would have been much better off had I wandered up US59 like I had originally planned. It would have been a much better trip driving up US59 and west on US18 when it hit the fan.

Geo

 

[Randy Denzer]

Sam Furman and I left Austin at 1 in a race to catch up with the Austin chasers who had already left to get to the Red River. We arrived in Ardmore at around 5 to meet up with Aaron Dooley, Tony Cook, and a couple of chasers out of Lewisville (Send me your names). We watched patiently as the Q would go up and then get ripped apart. Aaron suggested we shoot up north to the only tower (if you want to call it that at the time) within 70 miles of us. As we approached Norman we watched Aaron Dooley wildly waiving his arm out the window pointing his finger at a cell exploding to the southwest of Norman. This cell was showing no reflectivity on any of our systems and we initially thought we had radar troubles in the area. As the cell went storm warned it was little more than a blip on our screens. Aaron was able to change radar sites and see a little better imagery but not anything close to what we were seeing (first photo). The LP cell was quite impressive as we got under it moving through Norman. We shot east on 240 and was able to see an incredible amount of rotation and a couple of attempted funnel clouds. We then got caught up in the rat race chase through OKC at 45 miles per hour. We stayed on the cell and saw some minor storm damage on the east side of OKC and saw quite a bit of hail slightly smaller than baseballs. As we went through the Arcadia area we had one last funnel form directly over us. We had quite a bit of chase convergence and we had a tough time finding safe areas to pull completely off the roadway to shot. We continued east and followed the cell up through Agra and then pealed off to drive all night to get home. Made it back to Austin around 4 after an 850 mile chase! Hats off to Aaron Dooley and Shane Motley for seeing the potential in the area. It was a good chase!

 

[Amos Magliocco]

A few minutes after I shot the funnel posted below, one of the Skywarn net controllers talked about the image he was watching on a live television feed from a chase-copter hovering nearby. He said the rotation on the ground was from an "invisible rope." I thought, yep, that's 2008 for me so far: incredible structure with invisible tornadoes. Or "explain-adoes" as Scott Currens calls them. The ones where you have to direct the viewer to stand on his or her head, listen to Coleman Hawkins records and drink three gallons of water to see the tornado embedded somewhere in the image. There, see, right there! Don't look straight at it.

The shot below was taken looking north from the intersection of S Choctaw Road and E Reno Avenue at approximately 0030z. That's the Choctaw Church of Christ in the foreground, I believe, as best I can confirm from Google Earth and glean from the sign. A few minutes after the photo, damage reports came in. I don't know if this is a tornado or not. It looks like an elevated funnel to me.

0030z in Choctaw

over-processed crop of the same image, (spire up/funnel down)

I didn't intend to chase today at all, but I put in a fair day's work and left Denton for Ardmore, then left Ardmore when a new field of cu formed west of Norman. I came into the metro area in time to see a 6-7-05 style LP-ish updraft which appeared more than willing to produce a tornado. By the time I made the corner onto 240 eastbound, I thought a tornado was imminent, from a vigorously rotating wall cloud. I raced east to get the structure and tube both in the shot. Alas, it wasn't to be. Bob Fritchie, Rachael Sigler, and their co-worker Chip joined me later as we zig-zagged through mountain and meadow into the forest. Big dinner at Chilli's back in Norman followed.

In hindsight, I had last Thursday too much in mind when choosing to sit the day out (which I didn't do anyway), but it was clearly a stronger system without the specific jet quad deficiencies that may or may not have plagued us last week, and with much colder air aloft and stronger 'kinematics.' When the surface low formed out west and the cu fields appeared in south central OK, it was obvious this wasn't an identical scenario. I'm glad I left Denton when I finally did.

 

[James Langford]

A friend and I took off from the Dallas area around 3. Our initial target was Ardmore, as there was a nice cu field developing there when we left. When we got to Ardmore, there was nothing but clear skies. We didn't have any data, so decided to just keep heading north in the hopes of catching something up along the dryling. When we got to Paul's Valley, we saw the explosive updraft starting to form, and started to trail the storm. Pretty much followed it all the way from I35, through south OKC, along I40, north on 102, and finally up NE along I44. Beautiful LP elevated supercell with amazing structure. It was moving nice and slow too, so was pretty easy to follow through the OKC area. I was surprised to see the tornado warning, as we never saw any funnels touch down. We had a pretty good view of the base the whole time, and did see several funnels form and then dissappate. Also ran into golfball and baseball sized hail along highway 102. We were hoping to shoot some lightning pics, but the storm died rapidly just after dark.

I'm working on my video, but here are a few stills:

Just north of I40 on highway 102:

Further north on 102, along with everyone else and their brother from the OKC area

This was my first time chasing in central OK. I've heard folks on here talk about the chasing circus that follows storms, but I had never experienced it. I'm not sure I ever want to again. Several times on highway 102 we would come up over hills only to have folks all over the place, including standing in the middle of the road. Coming from North Texas, I don't normally see that. Maybe that's because we usually have HP type storms and also lots of rain. Anyway, I was glad my friend was long to do all the video and pics so I could focus on the road. Stay safe out there folks.

James

 

[sdienst]

Well we spent too much time on the southeast Kansas storms so we were late to the show in Osage county. I got to near Wynona around 9pm and viewed the tornado off to the west soon thereafter. Very hard to see but I managed to get one shot (handheld 8sec shutter) of the storm structure when a powerflash occured and lit up the tornado.

EDIT... a better pic here: http://learn.ou.edu/pages/personal/72118/5108_osage1_large.JPG

 

[Cris Schroeder]

Fun day in SE Kansas

I decided to chase the SE Kansas setup after work. I left Clearwater (SW of Wichita) around 4pm and headed E towards the building Cu. I worked my way down to US 166, trying to get around the cells popping near Burden. I blew east on 166 to Sedan where I ran into a couple of the College of DuPage Met vans. The road network in this area wasn’t cooperating as I wanted to head NE to get ahead of the southern cell. So, I headed N on K99 to US 160 and started east again, with some beautiful structure to the N and E of me.

There were a number of chasers watching some lowerings along US160 in the Longton/Oak Valley area, but I wanted to get east of the line so I worked my way to Independence and back north. I managed to get some potential wall cloud photos but by this time it was getting too dark to really note any rotation.

I made it to Fredonia, KS for gas but lost my data while tanking up. I started heading home on US400 while GRLevel3 updated, and sure enough a beautiful hook and tornado warning appeared. Unfortunately I was right in the middle of the hook.

Overall it was a good shakedown chase. I saw a number of lowerings/wall clouds but never saw anything touch down. Then again, I spent most of my time trying to get into better position, watching the action in my rear-view mirror.

Here's a shot looking west from Sedan, KS at the flanking line, while parked next to the COD vans:

An example of the types of lowerings I saw off and on, most of the evening:

Another wall cloud with some rotation on the left side of the image:

A wall cloud drifting across US 75, north of Independence:

A couple of images of the same meso, a little farther north:

 

[Earl Faubion]

Wayne Hlinicky, my sons and I first got on the unremarkable looking tail end storms west of Cedar Vale, KS. Then we headed south on Hwy 18, pausing just north of Cimarron turnpike to watch that storm drop three brief weak tornadoes before crossing Pawnee at sunset and cycling up to produce a long track tornado that we watched recede into the darkness to the northeast. We briefly considered pursuing but our lack of night chase experience won out so we called it a day.

 

[Gabe Garfield]

My target for Thursday was southeastern Kansas due to capping concerns. We left Norman at 2:30 p.m. and arrived in Bartlesville around 5 p.m. We targeted the developing storms near Sedan, KS. Though photogenic, the storms looked fairly strung out, and it looked like a squall line was beginning to develop. After running into several OU School of Meteorology seniors (Matt Chatelain and company) who had internet access, we made a quick decision to abort our original target area and go for the more isolated storms in Oklahoma.

We busted tail southward on Highway 99 and intercepted the Pawnee Co. supercell on Highway 20. A truncated cone/stovepipe tornado was already in progress when we stopped for photography. For the next 45 minutes, we watched tornadoes more-or-less continuously. The first tornado to our southwest widened significantly, perhaps up to 1/4 mile wide. This tornado had a spectacular rope-out. The next circulation formed ENE of the original, and it didn't waste any time producing a tornado. A very energetic tornado developed about 5 miles to our southwest. After this tornado dissipated, a new tornado formed from the same low-level mesocyclone to our west and northwest. This tornado was spectacular; initially a truncated cone with multiple vortices, it soon developed into an incredible elephant trunk that put on a "Wizard of Oz" show. We moved east on HW 20 after this, and were afforded an absolutely incredible view of the entire storm. From our perspective on the top of a hill, we could see the entire updraft, wall cloud, and tornado in the same view. It reminded me a lot of the Red Cloud, NE tornado of 10 June 2004, only better.

I have been chasing for a while and have seen some good stuff, but this day ranks up there with the best of my chasing career.

 

[Dick McGowan]

Darin Brunin, Eric B' Hymer and I stayed in nearly the same spot much of the evening near LaFontaine and Fredonia, relaxing, watching the great structure in front of us from two tail-end supercells, until sundown where we followed a couple of tornado-warned supercells after dark. We followed one from Fredonia, KS to north of Moran where it looked the best with a big, beefy wall cloud, before the storm completely evaporated.

We headed back north home, where a squall line was developing to our west and were pulled over and our car searched in Garnett, before he let us go on a warning for doing 40 in a 30 (which I was only doing 33 ). Evidently cookie crumbs that were on my shirt, the syran wrap from it, both resembled marijuana and paraphenalia, and the "aroma" was sensed in there too! We had a pretty good laugh and continued north into Ottawa just in time to watch stuff fly in the Wal-Mart parking lot from strong outflow winds! We navigated back into Lawrence from Ottawa around 2 a.m. and noticed several large tree limbs snapped in the road along US 59 and into Lawrence. Not a bad chase, I'm glad storms fired before dark and we were lucky enough to see some good structure.

Congrats to those who saw a hose!

 

[Jonathan Whitehead]

Well this day was a complete surprise at least for me.
On Monday I looked at 24 hr NAM and saw it had 50dews 50-100miles off Texas coast with mod northerly winds. I saw that and immediately made was turned off to anything that was being discussed for Thursday so I didnt look at anything (forecasts, models, ST) throughout the week. I will admit to seeing the Day2 on Wednesday from the projection of it on the NWC atrium 'globe' and noticed it was for eastern OK. So that made me feel even more better that I didnt have anything to worry about, being dead week and studying being a premium.
Fast forward to Thursday evening......
...I caught the SPC MD for central OK around 5:15 before heading out the door for the law library to study. Well I hadnt passed the adjacent apartment building next to mine when I stopped dead in my tracks. I couldnt help but notice the towering Cu's just on west side of Norman. Towers were enough that it def got my attention. I did a U-turn and headed back to my apt, grabbed my laptop and went upstairs to 3rd floor balcony looking west..(see pics for view-below)..and well as they say, the rest is history...it was an explosion once it ripped the cap.


My pics detail my chase.
Below are some samples....
For full album, go to http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2212394&l=8c0b2&id=9610241

EDIT: want to thank my chase partner Chris Sanner for the photo editing.

 

[PeteMcConnell]

Met Scott Olson in Laurel, Ne. Checked radar and immediately went to Yankton. From that point on we were off to the races trying to dodge hail and stay in the best position as the supercell cycled numerous times. Inflow was intense and it seemed certain that a tornado would form. We must not have been very far from Mike Hollingshead judging by his pictures. A humorous moment to mention. I blew a fuse, so no xm and no gps. I followed Scott as his equipment was functioning. He raced up a hill and his car went out of view. As I neared the top of the hill he went racing past me in the opposite direction laying on his horn. Not good. Before I could start to turn the car around hail began to plaster my van. The makings of a cartoon (no pun intended). Summary: we did the best we could with what we had. A good chase!

 

[Paul Stofer]

I started today sitting in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I noticed storms firing to my North in SE Kansas so I immediately shot North and sat in Independence, Kansas. I observed several intense storms with solid updrafts to my NW, but it appeared they were in a "grunge-like" cluster with no real means of getting good solid inflow except for the tail end. I didn't lose hope on the storms, but did re-adjust south when I notice storms firing along I35. I traveled South on 75 and then West on US60 out of Bartlesville. I then traveled South on highway 99 through Pawhuska and observed a very intense storm to my SW, which was the Osage storm. The storm had a healthy updraft with a very well defined inflow tail. I continued south on 99 through Wynona and into Hominy. At this time there was a large tornado being reported in the Vicinity of Pawnee, Skedee, and Blackburn. I waited in Hominy for the cell to get a little closer to I20, then immediately shot West on I20 out of Hominy. I stopped at the intersection of County Road 541 and I20 and observed a large wall cloud with intense rotation to my SW. At 0150 I observed a tornado on the ground just to my SW. This tornado lifted shortly after my arrival but once again dropped and continued moving to the NNE. I observed this cyclical activity for about 15 minutes as the tornado would drop then lift. I counted this at least 4 times. The updraft continued to still appear strong; however, as the storm disappeared into the distance a condensed funnel was no longer present. I did observe a couple of powerflashes, and then it was over. I went back East on 20 then North on 99 to catch back up with the storm, but it had decayed very rapidly and lost the majority of its intensity. I will upload storm video and captures later, but for now the news station has posted my video on the website at: http://www.fox23.com/mediacenter/[email protected]&navCatId=5 Also, congratulations to everyone who had success today. I've seen some incredible photos and video today. Structure today was phenomenal as well.

 

[Michael O'Keeffe]

Here are some video stills our chase in SE Kansas on Thursday. We also have a link to a Youtube video that basically sums up the chase.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-4T3_B95rU

 

[Tony Cook]

OK City Supercell

Played the Central OK dryline out of necessity (had to be back in Austin by 10 a.m. Friday). Myself, Aaron Dooley, Randy Denzer and Sam Furman, and Eric Burns and his partner waited in Ardmore for initiation. Took off north at about the same time the cells popped, and had a nice view of tail end Charlie as it entered Southern OK City. Saw a couple of funnel clouds, and incredible LP structure. All in all, would have rather been watching the tube fest on the next cell to the north though.

Looking North from I-35 approaching OK City:

Funnel cloud, just north of 240 in Southern OK City:

17.5 hours
950 miles

TonyC