7/12/07 REPORTS: CO / WY / KS

[Michael Carlson]

I jumped on the cell that went tornado warned in Greeley, from my vantage point it must have been a short live tornado because of how outflow the cell was. It did put out a nice outflow boundry out with some strong winds.

 

[Tony Laubach]

Nothing much to add as Michael and I were on the same storm (unknown to each other). I was actually on it before its tornado warning and was just a few miles southwest of the reported tornado. I was observing an interesting feature minutes before the warning went out, then got very excited when I heard the warning with law enforcment indicated tornado thinking I was actually looking at a tornado. As I neared Hwy. 85, there was a ton of rising scud and the occasional dust spin up, but nothing I would call tornatic. I stopped to check media of my feature and determined it to be a rain shaft as there was no visible motion when I ran the video. I'm curious, Michael, did you actually see the tornado?

So with that, I did not report seeing a tornado on this cell. I stuck with it into Greeley where I stopped to shoot street flooding and debating my next move. Being it only 5pm and rush hour well underway, going back to Denver was not a viable option, so I hopped east on CO-52 into Prospect Valley and blasted south to keep pace with the storms coming out of Ft. Morgan. Radar indicated they were weakening quite fast and upon my arrival in Bennett, I opted to call it a day and returned home.

A fun little afternoon trip; nothing spectacular, but definitely a stone's throw better than yesterday. Only thing missing were my buds! LOL

 

[Jonathan Merage]

Sorry for the late report. I was also on the Greely storm when the tornado warning was issued. Although I never spotted any clear rotation on the ground, it's easy to see why they warned this. Here's a panoramic of three separate shots I took of the leading edge of the huge outflow around the time of the warning. I was just off I-76 near the town Merino, about 20 mi. NE of Brush.

http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s132/jmerage/Brushoutflowpanoramawtmk.jpg

Tech Admin note: Please don't embed wide panaromas as they break the forum for people with less than huge screens. Thanks.
Very nice image however, be sure and click the link to view it!

There certainly could have been ground rotation somewhere in the left/west side of the image, but I couldn't discern anything among the turbulent mix of scud, dirt & precip. Also took some time lapse of the storm, which I'm working on & will upload to my site this week.

Moved south on 71 from Brush trying to stay ahead of another meso which developed on the southeast edge of the first outflow beast & ended up punching the core with 1/2 inch hail & hurricane-force crosswinds. We came out the other side to this struggling wall cloud with a CG flash illuminating the rainy core & a dust whirl (couldn't see whether the dust was rotating--but that was definitely the closest we saw to an organized & structured lowered base.

Stopped on H36 and took a shot of this ominous lowering to our southeast which despite the classic-looking structure was just another scud bomb. By this time I was well south of the much needed stronger upper winds. Notice the wet RFD burst directly southwest of the scud lowering.

All in all, a great Day-2 uplsope chase! LOTS of violent downbursts and scud, probably some short-lived gustnadoes. But the storms propogated south a little too quickly & moved too far from the upper-level winds, thus dampening the tornado potential. No complains, would've been nice to meet with old chase friends!

 

[Tony Laubach]

COMPLETE JULY 12, 2007 STORM CHASE LOG CAN BE FOUND HERE!!!

COMPLETE JULY 12, 2007 STORM CHASE LOG CAN BE FOUND HERE!!!