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.

The Kansas Severe Weather Aware­ness Week Packet con­tains some great stats on last year’s sea­son across the Sun­flower state. Some cool pho­tos, too. It’s on the NWS Wichita web­site (I pre­sume on the oth­ers, too) and I’m post­ing it here with their per­mis­sion.  Let’s just say my per­cep­tion of the sea­son wasn’t accu­rate — could have some­thing to do with miss­ing the NW Kansas stuff in June ;-)

PYKL3 Reflec­tiv­ity

I tried out the PYKL3 radar app on my Droid Incred­i­ble a few weeks ago. The free ver­sion is locked to a sin­gle radar site, and at the time the app was fairly early in its devel­op­ment. I planned to put it aside for a while and look closer to sea­son to see whether it was worth the (pretty expen­sive, as Apps go) cost to go to the paid version.

I was trolling the Equip­ment threads on Storm­Track this morn­ing and hap­pened across this one: New radar app for Droid

I was quite impressed that Joe Jurecka, the devel­oper, has become an active mem­ber of Storm­Track, at least in that he’s been respond­ing fre­quently to fea­ture requests and offer­ing expla­na­tions and updates about the soft­ware (it was about 5 pages into the thread when his mem­ber­ship was approved) . That’s tip-top cus­tomer ser­vice in my book, and I couldn’t get to the Mar­ket to down­load the paid app quickly enough — for that one reason.

And to say I’m heartily impressed with the app in its cur­rent state would be an under­state­ment. It’s miss­ing only a very lit­tle of what I use GRLevel3 to mon­i­tor in the field — storm-relative veloc­ity, for exam­ple — but Joe says it’s com­ing. And based on where he’s come from, I believe him ;-)

Will it replace the lap­top and GRLevel3? Not in a heart­beat. As I’ve said before, I pre­fer to have as many infor­ma­tion sources as I can when I’m in the field. This is one more…not some­thing that will replace any­thing I have. How­ever — given the num­ber of “unplanned” chases last year, I can see PYKL3 com­ing in very handy should I get into that sit­u­a­tion again!  (Note: he’s devel­op­ing for the Android pad, too.)

Well, cold weather has been in the plains for the past few weeks … and so that means it’s time the blood starts churn­ing for severe weather. Not so much the storms, of course, but the prepa­ra­tion for the season.

First new item this year is what I’ve taken to call­ing the “baby com­puter.” It’s what will han­dle my live stream­ing and GPS this sea­son, replac­ing the Dell tower PC that was seat-belted next to the sec­ond row seat in the old van. That PC gave up the ghost late in the sea­son last year (actu­ally, all that’s bad about it is the CMOS bat­tery, but the 8-year jump in tech­nol­ogy in the PC that’s replac­ing it was just too good to pass up).

The new stream­ing PC gets the name “baby com­puter” because it’s so small. Com­pleted, it’s just a lit­tle larger than two reams of copier paper stacked on one another.

This is the view in the top of the PC. For a size ref­er­ence, look at the 1-quart cup just to its left.

This is the view in the right side. As it will be installed in the van, this will be the top.

I’m still wait­ing on the wi-fi card, which plugs in the cen­ter of the moth­er­board, then I’ll be ready to put the oper­at­ing sys­tem and other soft­ware on it.

I’ll be able to do about any­thing media-wise from this machine. It has a multi-card reader, so I can pull the SD card from my video cam­era, the Mem­o­ry­Stick Pro from my still cam­era, and pretty much any other for­mat. The reader also sup­ports a SATA hard drive, and has a USB port. But with six USB ports on the PC itself, I have more of those than I need. A bit of overkill on the FireWire card, too, though I could con­ceiv­ably plug in and stream two cam­eras using it. The FireWire port on my older video cam­era died a cou­ple of years ago, so I doubt I’ll be doing that. With a 500 GB hard drive, I’ll be try­ing to stream my Flash video to the drive as well as live, giv­ing me a backup to the Mini-DV tape in the camera.

But the most excit­ing thing is that it can run directly off the van’s 12-volt power. No more inverter! (Actu­ally, I’ll prob­a­bly drop 2 of the 3 invert­ers).  I’m going to mount it to a plat­form that con­nects to the well that’s between the second-row cap­tains chairs in the van, put some power fil­ter­ing and surge pro­tec­tion in the pack­age, and run the PC, the wi-fi router, the cell booster, and maybe one or more AA bat­tery charg­ers all directly from the 12V plug that’s right there in the well. Elim­i­nat­ing the heavy-duty PC power sup­ply and stay­ing at 12V will have a huge impact on my bat­tery and alter­na­tor drain/wear.

Add to it the DC-to-DC power con­verter I got for the lap­top, and we’re just about AC-free. I haven’t decided whether to try and run the cam­era bat­tery charger and the video cam­era off 12V or to leave them on an inverter this year.

That may be it for new stuff this year — we’ll see. But I’m pretty stoked about not need­ing all those invert­ers and wires run­ning all over the place … just a mod­ule that can go in and out of the van at will. Chas­ing setup ought to go from over an hour to 10 min­utes or less. That’ll be moti­va­tion to not leave the stuff in the van all sea­son, reduc­ing road-related jar­ring of the equip­ment. What’s not to like?!

I’ll have an update in a few weeks, when it comes time to make the mods to the van … I’m plan­ning to run some power to both sides of the wind­shield where we can power the scan­ner and our phones. Look­ing for­ward to it!

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).

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.

I was headed out of town and some storms south­west of Wichita went severe, so I decided on a brief chase. Grabbed this video of a cloud that briefly looked like it might pro­duce. It didn’t.

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!