5/26/08 REPORTS: TX/OK/KS/MO

[Paul Knightley]

Mods - please add extra states as necessary.

In Pratt now - intercepted the storm west of Pratt, got engulfed by golf ball sized hail but punched east ahead of the storm. RFD cut into the low-level meso just SW of town producing a brief tornado which quickly got rain-wrapped - we started east out of Pratt to get ahead of the RFD when another tornado formed about 1/2 mile to our ESE, with multiple vorticies! The storm became more linear after that and we called off the chase.

 

[Jason Persoff]

SHORT: Frustrating day, but not for want of a good forecast. Busted along the OFB.

LONGER: Chase partners Bill Hark and Robert Balogh. The OFB that had generated early convection in ICT continued to move west. On the southern end of the OFB (on the KS/OK border), winds at the sfc looked highly convergent and the tongue of wildly narrow T/Td spreads looked primed. The OFB stalled slowly but not before undercutting storms over VNX. In fact, when we were north of the boundary/cold front, outside temps dropped to the 70s. South of it, the temps were above 90. I really liked the balance of 350/800mb crossover winds balanced with high CAPE, and a dry punch moving in from the SW, but didn't want to drop too far south where ventilation was going to be a problem and rotational/speed sheer began to drop off.

Ultimately, we targeted a storm that had a very promising appearance moving through Ellis and Woodward Ctys in OK and were especially pleased with how it looked like it was going to intersect with the OFB as the storms moved NE; we knew that the storms were likely high based, but could begin to benefit from the insane sfc moisture. To our shock, the cells went from good-ish appearing to gone in a matter of 30 mins. Worse, having been in Pratt only hours before, we watched as the OFB enhanced the cells near Pratt and realized that the shape of the boundary favored enhancing those cells with attendant risks for tornadoes. Which, now, we know did exactly that. Ouch.

Cells continued to congeal into an ugly mess, which Bill called convective vomit (which I thought was hysterical) and apt given the radar appearance. We were committed to the south at that point with no chance of seeing catching back up in time to enjoy the hailfest. We found ourselves squarely in the middle of no storms at all with warm, moist SE winds and nothing to for them to feed into.

Still, we felt very good with our forecasting today overall. It's hard to bust in a moderate risk. But we've had a good chase vacation, and have nothing really to regret.

My question to you gurus out there was what made you stick with the Pratt storms early? What about that specific area looked better to you? Was it the OFB with the SSW winds? Or did we miss something more subtle? Convergence, Tds, etc., drew us south.

 

[Mikey Gribble]

I chased the same tornado warned storm that went through Pratt. I never saw any tornadoes, but it was a fun chase strictly because we had good company today. I met Fred Plowman and Matt Harding while waiting on storms in Pratt. I also had Ryan Shirk and Jordan Hartley with me. And then finally we had the British with us again and they are a lot of fun to hang out with. We geeked around in the parking lot in Pratt and threw the football around for a couple hours. That was pretty much the highlight of my day. The storm wasn't that good IMO. It looked outflow dominant the whole time and I am honestly shocked that it produced any tornadoes.

 

[David Draun]

Frustrating day turns rewarding. That OFB punching west and south into the area was wrecking all sorts of havoc on the convection. Plenty of agitated cumulus with nothing really drawing attention to itself. Isolated cells began popping near Coldwater, KS. We were sitting at the Super 8 in Pratt alongside Michael Gribble and company for a good hour or so as we watched the OFB turn developing storms NW. I made the decision to head back towards Greensburg. After passing Cullison, we could see a rapidly lowering wall cloud. It was eventually obscured in precipitation. That storm sure looked mean going into Greensburg; I bet they were thinking "Here we go again." We enjoyed a little bit of marble-golfball-sized hail. It's a rental vehicle so we gotta be careful with that stuff, so we stayed out of the big cores. Spotter network showed Dave Drummond lost his windshield, so we are glad we went back east. Soon we found ourselves turned around and heading back to Pratt. We parked at the Super 8 again for data as the storm headed towards Pratt. There we could be safe from the 75 VIL the slow-moving HP beast was carrying. I could not understand why the TOR was dropped for this cell since it had a persistent BWER along US45. The shelf cloud approached us, (or so we thought it was a shelf cloud) and the flags pointing towards the storm suddenly whipped around to pointing away from the storm. But they were changing direction ever so slightly. It turns out the center of circulation was passing directly over us. As we backed up to turn around, the funnel formed and the rain-wrapped tornado developed. We lost it in the rain and fell behind the caravans going after it so we were not able to watch it reform and cycle over and over again. But a tornado is a tornado; chalk this one up as a successful chase! We are now in Wichita ready to take off into OK tomorrow. It was a rough ride getting here with plenty of HP supercells flinging hail and wind at us. Seeing the DOWs entering the city from US45 made us question hanging it up for the night, but we lack the equipment to chase at night.

As for targetting methodology, I'm no guru, but we decided to just target the highest severe parameters, and Pratt seemed the closest to them that we could get. Supercell composites of 20, EHI of 4, CAPE 4000-5000 J/kg, backed winds on the OFB, etc, etc. Just sounds good to me.

 

[Angie Norris]

I got to Enid about 3:30 and stopped at Mickey-D's to grab a peek at surface obs and radar data and noticed a little blip to the SW of Enid. I could see a couple of storms further north in probably KS which verified on radar. A special weather statement mentioned the possibility that the blip could further strengthen, so I called Bob Schafer (who was without data at the time) to let him in on what was going on, and I jumped back on Hwy 81 and headed north.
The storm made several attempts at putting down brief wall clouds, but not a lot else that I saw. I caught up with it at I-35 and Hwy 11, where it was warned for golf ball hail (and was the sky ever green, well maybe more teal than green ), and I decided just to let it go (didn't care to core punch, thank you, and that was going to be the only way of staying with it). About 5 or 10 minutes later, it went TOR warned, first doppler indicated, then spotter indicated for a rain wrapped tornado.
I don't regret making that decision at all. I'd much rather miss a tornado than mess up my car or myself. Anyway, the rest of the weekend has been more than successful, so I am quite pleased with my season.
Now, back to the "normal people" world.....

 

[Shane Adams]

Chad, Mick, Bridget, and myself were on the Kiowa/Pratt county storm from the first rain drop. Witnessed the storm go from benign to tornado-warned southwest of Greensburg, and could not help but feel for these people after last year, last weekend, and today. Stayed east of the storm as it became insanely wrapped up, with huge scud chunks racing into it from all around. Observed a brief tornado appx 4 south of Wellsford (report was me), then watched as the rotation tightened up again and almost did it twice.

We moved east and worked our way around the southeast portion of the storm, trying to stay head of the rain wrap as it kept trying to hide the attempts at TG. We shot video of several lowerings that were rapidly changing shape, but couldn't tell if there was any ground contact. After hearing reports later on of the two tornadoes near that area, I'm pretty sure we have them on video somewhere. Later on as we came back north to US54, we saw what appeared to be a quick needle tornado pass over the highway moving southeast...but I haven't seen any other reports of it and there were a ton of people there. The time was 7:18 or 7:20 by my watch....I'll have to watch the video to get the exact time. A few minutes later we saw what looked like a carrot-shaped tornado buried in the wrapping rain, south of the highway....which would've been a continuation of the possible tornado we saw crossing the road. If anyone else saw this I'd be interested to know what it looked like from your perspective. We were on 54 looking west, about a mile away.

Anyway, it's been an awesome week. Tornadoes on May 22, 23, 24, and today. Bridget remains perfect in her fledgling chase career, 4 for 4 with 18 tornadoes since Thursday.

 

[Jonathan Whitehead]

SHORT: Frustrating day, but not for want of a good forecast. Busted along the OFB.

LONGER: Chase partners Bill Hark and Robert Balogh. The OFB that had generated early convection in ICT continued to move west. On the southern end of the OFB (on the KS/OK border), winds at the sfc looked highly convergent and the tongue of wildly narrow T/Td spreads looked primed. The OFB stalled slowly but not before undercutting storms over VNX. In fact, when we were north of the boundary/cold front, outside temps dropped to the 70s. South of it, the temps were above 90. I really liked the balance of 350/800mb crossover winds balanced with high CAPE, and a dry punch moving in from the SW, but didn't want to drop too far south where ventilation was going to be a problem and rotational/speed sheer began to drop off.

Ultimately, we targeted a storm that had a very promising appearance moving through Ellis and Woodward Ctys in OK and were especially pleased with how it looked like it was going to intersect with the OFB as the storms moved NE; we knew that the storms were likely high based, but could begin to benefit from the insane sfc moisture. To our shock, the cells went from good-ish appearing to gone in a matter of 30 mins. Worse, having been in Pratt only hours before, we watched as the OFB enhanced the cells near Pratt and realized that the shape of the boundary favored enhancing those cells with attendant risks for tornadoes. Which, now, we know did exactly that. Ouch.

Cells continued to congeal into an ugly mess, which Bill called convective vomit (which I thought was hysterical) and apt given the radar appearance. We were committed to the south at that point with no chance of seeing catching back up in time to enjoy the hailfest. We found ourselves squarely in the middle of no storms at all with warm, moist SE winds and nothing to for them to feed into.

Still, we felt very good with our forecasting today overall. It's hard to bust in a moderate risk. But we've had a good chase vacation, and have nothing really to regret.

My question to you gurus out there was what made you stick with the Pratt storms early? What about that specific area looked better to you? Was it the OFB with the SSW winds? Or did we miss something more subtle? Convergence, Tds, etc., drew us south.

In a word....DITTO

See my posts in 5/26 FCST thread

Highlight of the day: running into the TIV for the 1st time since 2005 at intersection of 14 and 400 in Kingman, KS. Had it on my butt for a brief period before turning off onto 14 and pulling over cause you never want to follow to TIV...bad things happen when you follow the TIV.

EDIT: LMAO...convective vomit....BLAHHHH..(heave)..HUHHH...blowing chunks would be...hmmm..I wonder

 

[Brandon Ivey]

Wow, what a weekend for storms! Today was good off and on. We first got on the tornado warned storm that was moving towards Greensburg. We did not film the wall cloud associated with the storm at that time because we went west into the hail core and documented a 4" diameter hail stone. Most of the hail was around 1.75" but we found this one lone hailstone sitting on a dirt road to our south. The storm then became crappy and outflow dominate as it rolled east towards Pratt County. Then as this cell hit the outflow boundary it went crazy again for about 20-30minute. It had a really nice mother ship structure and dropped at least 2 (possibly 3) tornadoes in the Pratt area. You can watch the video of this chase through the link below. Man I need to catch up on some sleep!

http://thestormreport.com/blog/2008/05/may-26th-2008-kansas-hail-tornadoes/

 

[cdcollura]

Good day,

I was able to get away from the multicell "stuff" along the outflow boundary and take the "when in doubt, go south" idea. I chose the southern cell, and ran into gigantic hail and was rewarded with a tornado east of Pratt, Kansas.

Above: Large funnel / possible first tornado south of Greensbirg, Kansas.

Above: Cone tornado east of Pratt, Kansas.

Above: Core punching has it's prices ;-(

Be sure to check out my full chase log in the section on my site at the link below...

http://www.sky-chaser.com/mwcl2008.htm#MAY19

 

[Mike Kovalchick]

Mods - please add extra states as necessary.

In Pratt now - intercepted the storm west of Pratt, got engulfed by golf ball sized hail but punched east ahead of the storm. RFD cut into the low-level meso just SW of town producing a brief tornado which quickly got rain-wrapped - we started east out of Pratt to get ahead of the RFD when another tornado formed about 1/2 mile to our ESE, with multiple vorticies! The storm became more linear after that and we called off the chase.

Ditto for me. We core punched the cell from Greensburg all the way to Pratt(egg size/shaped hail East of Greensburg) where we finally got out in front of it. The first tornado(it took 2 or 3 tries to get a funnel on the ground)..seemed to spirl South into wrapping rain curtains where it disappeared. (Few moments later the tornado sirens sounded in Pratt).

The second was a pure delight to watch as it emerged out of the rain..with multiple vorticies dancing around..reappearing/disappearing just as fast. Great end to my chase vacation!

EDIT: Pic of the first Pratt Tornado.

Video of one of the Pratt Tornadoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgmYNV_gKIM

 

[Laura Duchesne]

Wow what a day. Left St. Louis this morning and targeted south central Kansas west of I35. Ron Gravelle, Jack Kertzie, company and I were hoping to catch development later on from two boundaries interacting with each other in the evening, one from the previous earlier storms and one coming from the west. Fred Plowman passed us and said hi to Ron. We targeted the storm near Pratt around the dinner hour. Saw a large rain/hail core. We got into about 1 to 1.5 inch hail and rain mix. We stopped in a spot to view the storm, which had strong inflow winds (never did get a measurement of that with my Kestrel) and we got back onto hwy 281. We encountered a very torrential rain/hail mix with almost 0 visibility, then it cleared. A weak brief semi transparent tornado formed about 50 to 100 ft from us, crossed the road into the grass field on our right. I rolled down the window and we could hear the howling/hissing noise from it! I snapped a picture but it doesn't really do justice of what it was really like. After that, we observed another area of some slight rotation on a dirt road (it wasn't very muddy) and decided to continue north because it wasn't doing much. Well were we wrong. Jack pointed right above and said there was a funnel there. I couldn't see it from my angle but all of a sudden, a circulation of dirt and tumbleweeds hit us directly and continue for a little bit behind us. Winds went it one direction at first but then very quickly switched directions, then it came atop us with debris flying around. After gaining our senses back, we realized we had been directly hit by a weak tornado. First time for me. It was a surprise and we did not intend to get into that situation. After that, there really wasn't much else going on and staying the night in ICT at Motel 6. We reported the two tornadoes via spotter network.

Pic of first weak tornado... it may not look like much here but tornadic circulation was definitely there. It was partially transparent.

 

[Barb Mayes]

Lots of miles pay off

What felt like a bust turned into a pretty good chase! We (chase partner, Scott, and I) targeted Pratt, KS, initially and arrived there around 1pm. Spent some time in the vicinity and then jumped north to the first cell that really went up, north of Great Bend... more for fun than anything . We confirmed it was undercut by the boundary and then dove southwest out of Great Bend toward the northern of the two main cells in KS, intercepting it near Larned. We heard it had great rotation on radar, but it took us a long time to work into a position where we could see any cloud-base rotation at all. We did see weak rotation near St. John before being overcome by the storm. With no good options to head east ahead of that storm, we opted to dive south to the more southern storm that was approaching Pratt from Greensburg. Got into Pratt and found our way to the edge of the shelf cloud a few miles east of town. We thought we'd get a nice picture of the shelf and then head back to Lawrence for the night, but as we were positioning for the optimal shelf shot, we heard a report of a tornado near Pratt! We got back to Highway 54 within a minute, and sure enough, we could see the cone from our position a few miles east of town. We sat about 3 miles east of Pratt for several minutes and watched the cone morph into a large cloud-base circulation with multiple vortices reaching the ground, all of which was on the ground for about 5 minutes. We pushed eastward ahead of it on Highway 54 after the circulation became rain-wrapped, but we never had another glimpse at anything reaching the ground.

In short, we spent 600 miles of gas to begin and end in Pratt. But worth the journey .

 

[Jay Press]

This is Brian Press signing in under my brother Jay's account. We are both out here from Southern California.

Pretty much the same story as those on the Pratt storm. Actually, I do have brief funny story. We were trying to stay ahead of that storm for quite some time. Decided to stop in Pratt at the Long John's Silver to get a quick bite. As we were going through the drive-thru, Tornado sirens started wailing in the city. We had just paid the lady money for our food when the sirens went off and she look at us like, hummm.. what do I do. I told my bro we needed to get out and see what was around us. I thought the folks working there had just abandoned us and our food and money, (safety first, I know) to find some shelter, but before we knew it, our food was ready and we were off to the east. Just as we were pulling out of the city, we saw a well defined cone shaped funnel with some vortices dancing around the base. It touch down 2 or 3 times then got wrapped up in the rain but we could still see it for a few minutes. We went under some rapidly rotating rain curtains too. It was pretty exciting! We really did find a needle in the hay stack!!!

I have attached a few screen grabs from our video.

B.p.

 

[George Kourounis]

What an interesting end to what I thought was going to be a marginal day. We targeted the area near Greensburg and our forecast was good, we waited just outside of town as a severe warned storm approached and began to show signs of rotation. Our three vehicles for Cloud 9 Tours were spaced apart in different pull-offs when Van 2 got stuck in the mud shortly after the storm became tornado warned. The place where we were parked was an area that was decimated by the EF-5 tornado last year and was quite muddy. Large hail began to fall and there was no way that anybody was going to go outside to push the van out until the worst of the hail core had passed. We eventually used a tow strap to pull them out of the muck, the chase was to resume.

The storm continued on and we followed it through Greensburg. It was eerie to be chasing a tornado warned storm through that town, especially since the scars from the last direct hit were still so evident. Luckily, the town was spared and we pushed on further east. We tried getting ahead of the storm but didn't want to face the gigantic hail that was likely in it As it tuned out, there was more development to our southwest and we soon began to get hit by bigger and bigger hail stones. We ended up finding a cotton farm which had a huge tin roof overhang which was perfect to fit all three vehicles underneath. The sound of the hail on the metal roof was deafening! The cacophony was so loud that I had to scream at people beside me to be even slightly heard. The hail grew up to the size of golfballs and we noticed that on the wat up to the the shelter, we had taken enough hits from the hail that a new batch of dents had been added to the vehicles but we did manage to keep all the glass intact.

After the worst of it had passed, we continued east towards Pratt. We had almost given up on the storm when it began a revival and took on a great shape on radar. As we punched through the backside of the hook, we kept looking to the southeast to see if there was actually a tornado in there. As we got to Pratt, we emerged from the rain and there it was, a wispy cone shaped tornado!! I only saw it for a few seconds before it vanished and we got into town where our view was blocked. We sent in a report to Spotter Network and soon the sirens in Pratt were wailing. We blasted through town and got further east when another tornado touched down on the south side of highway 54 very close to our location . It was a broad circulation with multiple vortices that wasn't very photogenic but it was coming our way. Be sped off and got ahead of it before it threatened to cross the road.

We put some space between ourselves and the storm and eventually stopped again to get some pictures of the storm structure. When it was time to get back to the vehicles, I looked back and noticed another rain wrapped tornado. This one was shaped like a slender cone. It was visible only briefly but was spotted by numerous other chasers as well.
We eventually made it to Wichita for the night. Another great chase day.

http://www.stormchaser.ca/Tornadoes/2008_05_26_Pratt/2008_05_26_Pratt.html

George Kourounis
www.stormchaser.ca

 

[Adam Lucio]

In short we were on the Pratt storm the moment it went up till it became an OF dominated air conditioner. Witnessed amazing structure and got bombarded with lots of hail a few times but somehow managed to miss the tornado/s. My guess is we tried to stay too far ahead of it to avoid the more serious hail thus making it hard to see through all the precip. To hell with playing it "safe" around HP bombshells. Ill stay close and take my chances with the baseballs.

On our way back to Wichita we got bombarded with hail again by some suprise development.

Came back today with some great structure shots, awesome hail and lightning video so it was a successful chase in my opinion. We forecasted our target perfect so that was a win.

Staying at my buddys house in Wichita and debating if we want to chase in the hilly amazon tomorrow.