KSStorm Blog

Just a short post.…too much to do this morn­ing before I can get on the road. I’m plan­ning to start this after­noon in Hutch or McPher­son, as things stand now. Look­ing to be at one of those stag­ing points by 4–4:30pm. There’s a lot of hedg­ing going on in my mind…a more spe­cific tar­get just may not be doable today.

For­tu­nately, the higher chance for high-end severe weather is much fur­ther north­east, so the roads won’t be lit­tered with chasers. Of course, in that area of the state, there tend to be a lot of yahoo “chasers” on the back roads. You give some, you get some, I guess. Maybe the risk of hail instead of tor­na­does will keep them some­what at bay.

Looks like Pat and I (at the least) will load up the van today and give the new equip­ment setup a try. We’ll be head­ing into the far east­ern edge of the KBS cov­er­age area, stag­ing in Empo­ria and mak­ing a deci­sion from there.

Not really expect­ing much in the way of tor­na­does, but look­ing for enough chance of hail­ers around sun­set that it’s worth tak­ing a few hour drive. The trip is as much to work the bugs out of the new setup as anything.

Once again, busy-ness in another part of life led to me being caught by sur­prise with a chase oppor­tu­nity. Roxan and I were run­ning errands yes­ter­day when a Tor­nado Watch was issued for our area.

This snap is from the Greene Vision Group park­ing lot on North Ridge Road, look­ing east at a storm grow­ing in But­ler county, just min­utes after the watch issuance.

In spite of the growth of that storm, I felt it would be a while before there was any real action right around Wichita. So we went and had a late lunch/early din­ner. After meet­ing the girls at Cristi’s school and get­ting the lap­top and what I needed to get some data, we took off for west­ern Sedg­wick county. The north­ern part of the county was already under a severe thun­der­storm warning.

We sat south­east of God­dard, at 31st S & 151st west, for quite a while.

This is the rain foot as the storm started to make a right turn.

(5:37pm) We watched this scud cloud be con­densed from the edge of the rain foot until it was drawn back into the storm.

(5:40pm) Here it is as it was drawn into the cloud base

(5:54pm) We decided to move south. This was taken from 151st & Selma. There was sus­tained rota­tion in the clouds near­est us, but the cloud above was not show­ing the same rotation.

(5:57pm) With apolo­gies to Ken Cox at the NWS — this is what I called in as a tor­nado, from 151st W & K-42. Why I didn’t think gust­nado until some­one else said it, I’m not sure. This is as the swirl was dying down. As we’d dri­ven south, we’d crossed the gust front about half a mile N of where I shot this. The dust in the front was being blown then, appar­ently by some inflow, though it was being blown from SW to NE. If you enlarge the shot, you can see the out­flow approach­ing, right behind the dust swirl. As this spun up, the swirl arced the full height of the gust front and looked briefly to me like it con­nected to the cloud.

We saw sev­eral more of these as we drove along with the gust front, and in each case it was right at the inter­sec­tion of the gust front and south­west wind flow. each time, we were in south­east wind flow.

We pulled up in a church park­ing lot next to the fire sta­tion west of Haysville. As we got stopped, a sus­tained whirl showed up just to our west — lit­er­ally on the north bound­ary of the fire sta­tion prop­erty. This one was dif­fer­ent in char­ac­ter than the ear­lier ones. It was longer-lived, but not long enough for me to get a shot of it — partly because we were hit with heavy rain almost simul­ta­ne­ously. But there was just a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter to this one, too. Less than a minute later, the first tor­nado warn­ing was issued for Sedg­wick county. I don’t know if we were see­ing the same thing, but I felt it at the time.

(6:30pm) This is taken from Merid­ian and about 87th South, look­ing back toward Haysville. There’s a hint in there that could be an obscured tor­nado, but I’m really not sure.

(6:30pm) This one is a lit­tle bet­ter, but I’m still not sure. And I wasn’t sure when I was see­ing it live. We con­tin­ued south to Clear­wa­ter Road and went east to Broad­way, try­ing to get to the south­east of the cir­cu­la­tion. As we got to the Clear­wa­ter Road & Broad­way inter­sec­tion, Roxan and I both saw the cone stick down from the cloud, appear­ing to be about over the Turn­pike about 3 or 4 miles north of us. We saw it too quickly and were turn­ing south, so nei­ther of us is sure whether it was visu­ally con­nected to the ground at that point.

(6:44pm) We par­al­leled the storm on 119th South as it was being reported pass­ing through Derby. This is taken from the west edge of Mulvane.

(6:56pm) We went through Mul­vane on 119th, and stopped at But­ler Road to take this.

We’d gone South on But­ler Road to K-15 and were com­ing back to Wichita, as I wasn’t pre­pared for an out-of-county chase. As we passed Geuda Springs Road, we encoun­tered the sec­ond storm. We had to stop on the side of K-15 due to field debris being blown across the road. As nearly as I can remem­ber, we’d have been about where the marker is. The corn shucks in the air and the long grass in the ditch showed three dis­tinct areas of cir­cu­la­tion — wind’s I’d esti­mate at 60–70 mph — cross­ing us while we were stopped there. None was larger than about 25 feet in diam­e­ter, but each was a dis­tinct col­umn of cir­cu­la­tion than moved through the air, which was oth­er­wise full of corn shucks blow­ing NE to SW.

(7:22pm) This round bale and another were blown from the field at the west edge of the map above, at Oxford Rd and K-15. If you look care­fully, you can see where this one crossed the veg­e­ta­tion at the edge of the field. The two bales were almost 90 degrees apart in their ori­en­ta­tion from the field…the other bale was in the K-15 ditch. This one was also 90 degrees to the direc­tion of the straight-line wind flow we’d expe­ri­enced 3/4 mile away.

(7:25pm) This tree was down on the edge of the farm­stead at 1256 K-15 High­way. The base of the tree is to the NE, and it’s lay­ing to the SW. The trunk was about 2 feet in diam­e­ter. It’s about 3/4 mile NW of the hay roll.

(7:31pm) This util­ity pole was down just to the south­east of 1332 K-15 High­way, on the east side of the road.

(7:31pm) This tree was down right across the road from it, blown the same direc­tion. The base is a lit­tle less than 2 feet in diameter.

We got home to find the power out, and it stayed off until 11:30pm. Haven’t done a walka­round of the house yet or gone to see the dam­age to our north.

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).

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.

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.

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.