The final day, sadly, as my first stormchasing trip comes to a close.
It was not a day without event though. Not only did we come within 100ft of a tornadic spinup, but we saw a distant dusty tornado and also, apparently, came pretty close to a large wedge despite not even seeing it!
The day started with a drive South from Loup City back into Kansas. Our target zone was the Town of Osborne in North Central Kansas. We made it in good time and sat back waiting for the storms to fire over us.
Unfortunately it wasn’t to be that easy. We had a pretty major internet fail, which required a good hours worth of head scratching and and troubleshooting. In the meantime a monster storm had begun tearing up Northern Kansas. We had to high-tail it back North to intercept the storm at about 6:30pm. By this time the storm was already part of a larger MCS, but the southern cell, the ‘tail-end Charlie’ still had lots of life left in it. We tracked its southern flank as the rotation began to tighten.
We were on dirt roads at this point, finding ourselves directly under the updraft. Suddenly we were aware of rotation on the ground in front of us, crossing the road and tearing up drass and dirt, about 100 yards away. We didn’t spot a condensation funnel, due to being right beneath it, but the wall cloud above our heads was swirling madly. It was time to get out of there and we turned South to give us a bit more distance. Looking back North we could see another brief tornado, kicking up dirt in the fields, this time the funnel could be seen, though sadly not in this picture.
A weak dusty tornado. You can’t really see the whole funnel in this snap, but it was there.
Ominous lowering that came to nothing.
We headed East again, to get ahead of the circulation. At our new vantage point we could see another lowering coming past, but it began to wrap up in rain from the South. It turns out that shortly afterwards a tornado formed inside there somewhere, but we were out of road and out of time, so it was time to head West to get in range of our flight home.
An enthralling chase, which ended with us hanging our hats in Wakeeney in central Kansas. Tomorrow its on to Denver and home.
Lowering starts to wrap up in rain. It was in here that the large confirmed tornado later formed – though we didn’t see it from the South
a new Meso forms
Sun peeks in from behind
Moody
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