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.

A quick update on today before I head to bed:

That was a close call. I’m not sure yet what severe parameter didn’t quite make it, but based on the radar-indicated path of the rotation in the storm that tracked across Wichita, the fact that the tornado reported north of Viola lifted before reaching town is something we should all be thankful for. The track is very near what I would have considered a worst-case scenario for Wichita.

We were a bit behind it (north edge of Suppesville) when that tornado was reported; to us it looked like a rain-wrapped funnel. But I don’t doubt at all the two reports from 7-8 miles N of Viola. I won’t be surprised to find that the actual distance was closer to 5 miles; it is quite hard to correctly estimate distance in those situations. I would have pegged it about 2 miles NE of us, but I think I was probably estimating too close.

In and amongst everything else tomorrow, I am going to have to find time to re-configure the power distribution in the van. We lost the PC that handles GPS and streaming right in the heat of things, and after it came up were having problems with the wireless access point I use to get into it from the laptop. Aging wiring in the van, a bit too much power pull on the inverters, and a pair of aging inverters are the likely culprit. I’m hoping that replacing the inverters and running a dedicated power wire for the cell booster will fix the problem.

Game on again for Wednesday – I’m sitting out tomorrow, due to too many family commitments and the conditional nature of the risk.

The Thunderstorm Watch is from here northeast, until 10pm. I think SPC went with that because the tornado risk is so conditional and so early in the watch period. AFAIK, a tornado would verify a thunderstorm watch, anyway.

One of the models had a nearly perfect handle on this first batch of storms in its run around midday. THey are p laying out almost exactly as the model showed, scooting to the northeast and out of our area with apparently low-end severe weather. Based on that model (with some reinforcement from another one updated more frequently) I’m looking for the weather maker storms to fire a little southeast of Wichita….it’s going to be a close call as to whether it misses town, I think… In that batch of storms, any severe mode is possible. I think any tornadoes that happen will be fairly brief, as the storms should line out pretty quickly.

The dry line and cold front (they are pretty close together, if the front hasn’t already passed the dry line) are continuing to move through the metro now, but they’ve slowed a bit, I think. The last batch of storms fired right on them. I think the next batch will be out ahead just a bit.

Headed home from Pratt now. Kind of a downer…first bust in over a year.

Seems like a bunch of chasers have come to the same conclusion at about the same time. Over the past 20-30 minutes many of us have come up with reasons to go to the west or southwest. Off to Pratt we head! It puts us closer to the dry line, and back in the zone where I was thinking earlier.