KSStorm Blog

The girls and I went to Pratt yesterday because Mom’s computer needed fixing. The first storms of the day happened to form over our head. After they moved east, we decided to start for home. But as we cleared the east edge of town, I saw what appeared to be a wall cloud hanging down from the storms that were south and west of Pratt.

It took a few miles to decide to at least try and get closer to confirm or deny my initial impression. These are a few shots taken when we got stopped, at the corner where K-42 meets the Cairo-Isabel Road (100th East in Pratt county).

Looking NW about 3 miles.

This has a somewhat wall cloud appearance to it. But a careful look shows it’s an optical illusion…this cloud is not attached to the could behind it. It’s a tail cloud, the moisture being pulled into the storm. The rain is to the left out of the photo.

Looking West Toward Sawyer

This view is about 45 degrees counter-clockwise from the one above. I’m looking due West. Now the rain shaft is to my right. You can also see the moisture being pulled into the southernmost part of the storm.

Looking due South

The grain elevator on the left is Isabel. We left just a couple of minutes after this photo. As we drove north, we experienced peak winds of about 45 miles an hour, maybe 50.

An interesting phenomenon — as the rain was blown across the road it was being pushed fast enough that it appeared to be clearing the east ditch and going directly into the adjacent corn field. I’ve never seen that before, so far as I remember. Unfortunately, there was too much water being blown across the windshield at the moment to take a photo, and I wasn’t about to stop in essentially zero visibility.

Not bad results for a chase decision made only 40 minutes earlier, and with no other data than my eyes and the radar on the cell phone. The camera in my HTC Incredible — wow…I can’t believe these are cell phone photos.

Good news: no one was seriously hurt. Bad news: a “new” (to me) chase ride is probably in the not-so-distant future. Story later…my sore self is headed to bed.

When you’re looking at SPC outlooks, the new day starts at 7am. So our chance for overnight storms is represented by a Slight Risk outlook in Day 1 (today). The rest of us see overnight storms as being tomorrow

I haven’t looked at it in detail, but my feel is that overnight will bring us some borderline-severe hail in the Wichita area, off storms moving in from Oklahoma along with the front.

Tomorrow looks to me like a warm-front play. Those situations have been good to Matt and me in the past year – most of the activity we recorded last year was related to north-moving fronts. Some of the parameters look pretty impressive around Wichita in the mid to late afternoon – nothing like yesterday, but still nice, from a chasing point of view.

I am not planning to go into any more detail on the setup at this point – 20 minutes of glancing at a couple of models is just not enough for me to hang my hat on. I won’t be surprised to see us hanging around Wichita, give or take 50 miles, tomorrow.

Hopefully the models, especially the RUC, will have the same kind of handle on tomorrow they had on yesterday, as I don’t think Matt or I will have the time to do the detailed forecasting we did for yesterday’s event. Between the two of us, I know of at least 7 hours’ forecasting work over the weekend and yesterday that went into our decision-making process.

Speaking of which, a big thanks to ICT Lead Forecaster Brad Ketcham, who talked with us multiple times while home caring for a sick young’n. His forecast hints helped us verify out thinking and he was a big help during the heat of things yesterday afternoon, when we were trying to get in behind the tornado, fighting equipment problems, and outrunning a hail core. As with all these things, it takes a team effort to get it done safely.

Look for a brief post in the morning – with the apparently earlier start, I doubt I’ll have a lot of time for detail, but I’ll update on the target thinking, at least!

An out-of-band commend from a friend concerning this morning’s post made me feel the need to clarify something I said in each of the last two posts. That’s the comments about patterns that look like certain historical tornado days.

See, I’m a pattern person. I don’t have but a smattering of meteorological background, and any knowledge I have is the result of watching others and the patterns of the atmosphere. That and a little reading inthe past few years.

So when I say the pattern for resembles May 3, 1999, I’m not really saying I think the outcome will be the same. I’m saying the forecasts, at least according to the models I believe and the patterns my mind recognizes subconsciously, indicate the highest probability for severe weather in a pattern that is like May 3rd. In other words, I buy into a solution that has big storms in both Oklahoma and Kansas, about 90 minutes to 2 hours’ drive apart, including strong, long-lived tornadoes.

Do I think either Moore or Haysville are gonna get clobbered again? As of this moment, no. Others have said this bears resemblance to the US 160 outbreaks in 2004. I mentioned a passing resemblance to the Andover tornado yesterday.

I think what this really means is that all the ingredients are there. The way they are setting up resembles, in some fashion, aspects of one or more of those days. But this *is* forecasting, and we *are* talking about the atmosphere. The devil is in the subtle details we *can’t* forecast until 6-8 hours before storms fire, if then. Any one of a laundry list of things changes in the wrong way and we get nothing. A couple of them change the other way and we have a major problem.

The takeaway is that tomorrow is not a day to be complacent about. If you are in the I-35/135 corridor give or take 90 minutes’ drive, south of I-70, you should be aware of your surroundings and how they are changing between about 3pm and 10pm tomorrow.

BTW: The models came into a little better agreement at 12z (7am). In Kansas they are narrowing down the area of potential, IMO. They are also elevating the Oklahoma potential. I don’t see a reason to shift targeting much yet. My line to be somewhere along at initiation is somewhere in the Clearwater to Kingman vicinity…depending a lot on what happens tonight and through 1pm tomorrow.

Decided to take an afternoon and go on a solo chase. Northern KS, maybe a county or two into NE. I’m streaming, if you’re interested.

Thought I’d take a stab here and see if there are any software coders following the blog feeds. Specifically, I need someone who may be interested in helping found a company. I have several ideas for software that will help connect radio & TV stations to the Real-Time web – in most cases their present content management tools just don’t cut it. Real Time News Link is a plug-in that would enable their content management systems to exchange information directly with web backends and the Real-Time web (Twitter, Facebook and so forth).

I’m heading to Dallas next weekend for StartupWeekend – over three days, several people band together around various ideas and build companies. I’d be willing to spring for the gas and your event ticket if you’d be willing to come help me recruit a team of coders to put out a prototype of the application by Sunday night. To keep the topic form getting too off-target, I’ll refer you to the RTNewsLink website to find out more about the project. Or email me to find out more.

Seeing as how it’s Easter and the risk area is 3 hours away, Matt & I have decided to spend the afternoon with family instead of chasing. Of couse, the way *my* family is, a family chase may be in the offing. Or we may just write it off & charge up for tomorrow & Tuesday. Happy Easter!