5/29/07 REPORTS: CO / KS / NE

[Paul Townsend]

I took a little excursion to the north end of Lake Winnebago to see if any interesting features would form on the north-northeastward moving updrafts that were going to run parallel to the lake breeze on the west side of Lake Winnebago. The updrafts did propogate to the right upon injesting the boundary air but nothing too noteworthy developed. However I did catch video of a stationary, multiple vortex, helical vorticy about 150 yards from me. A bugnado. Very cool.

Bugnado

 

[Mike Umscheid]

I decided to chase after I got off work at 3:30pm -- I left immediately for the higher CAPE air along the Arkansas River valley near Lamar. When I left, the Limon supercell was already getting going. I realized that once I got to Lamar, the convective environment would be much different as I approached the convection. I got as far northwest as about 5 S Eads when numerous storms were developing to my west and northwest poleward of the surging outflow boundary. I was too late... but quite a long shot -- so I turned around and headed back south to Lamar... basically playing tag with the 40-50mph winds and blowing dust. I pretty much wrote this chase off as a busted waste of time and money... but when I got to Syracuse KS new convection was developing at the leading edge of the outflow boundary surge. This time, though, updraft with the storms were closer to the surface boundary... thanks to increased southeasterly flow surface flow ahead of the storms. This at least provided for some halfway decent shelf structure. I continued to play tag with the Northwest Wind + dust trying to remain at that optimal distance east of the shelf cloud to get decent photos. I "played tag", if you will, until I got home... from east of Syracuse to Dodge City along Hwy 50. Below are a couple long exposure results:

Nikon D70 & 18-55mm lens @ 18mm, f/3.5, 10.0s, ISO320.
Just west of Holcomb, KS at 9:35pm (radar screenshot)

Nikon D70 & 18-55mm lens @ 18mm, f/3.5, 25.0s, ISO500.
About 8 W Dodge City at 10:50pm (radar screenshot)

 

[Shane Adams]

Chad and I ended up in Oakley, where our brief hope of intiation eroded away with our cu field by 7pm. Decided to go north to Colby, then north further still to the NE border....where we realized the day was crap. Just to say we'd been there, we drove an extra ten feet north into Nebraska, then turned around and started back home. The highlight of the day was our McDonald's lunch in Woodward, extra greasy burgers and the fries were so fresh you could taste the transfat...MMMMMMMM good!!!!!

 

[Matt Grantham]

damage

Took some pictures this morning of the damage to the motel. They can be found here. Also the KSDOT station a few hundred yards away recorded a gust of 61kts then had a screwed up report and then recorded 65kts 15 minutes after the 61.

http://s204.photobucket.com/albums/bb32/wx4mat/5-29-07/