Day two on Joey and Charlie’s storm chasing adventure was mainly a day of driving. After we finally arrived at our hotel at 3 AM Sunday morning, we slept in as late as possible and headed out just before our checkout time (although not before waking up early to gulp down the esteemed “Continental Breakfast”).
We got a chance to meet up with Dakota Smith at the Blue Moon in Denver for burgers and beers. Dakota is a meteorologist at Colorado State University who is finishing his masters thesis, which concerns integrating satellite data into climate models to improve their accuracy. I met Dakota at the American Meteorological Society Weatherfest in Seattle this past January when he walked up to my WeatherTogether booth there. I’ve also talked about WeatherTogether, my job at Avangrid as a wind energy forecaster, and my obsession with geoduck clams on The Weather Junkies, a podcast he runs with Tyler Jankoski, a broadcast meteorologist for WPTZ 5 in Burlington, Vermont. Tyler and Dakota have had some very famous people on their podcast – Good Morning America meteorologist Ginger Zee, NWS Director Dr. Louis Uccellini, Joel Gratz of OpenSnow, and many, many others. It was great catching up again with Dakota, he’s a super smart dude and a really nice guy. I highly recommend you check out The Weather Junkies, and if you are interested in hearing my podcast with Dakota and Tyler, you can check it out here.
After finishing our drinks and food, Joey and I bid farewell to Dakota and started our trek eastward to Kansas, where it appeared that more storms would form. We weren’t too far east of Denver when we started to see some storms building on the horizon, but these storms were likely around 400-500 miles away.
Which brings me to another thing: the Great Plains are FLAT, especially once you get into west-central Kansas. I’ve seen flatter terrain – there is the occasional rolling hill – but there are a few additional factors that make the plains seem extremely flat. First, no mountains are visible on the horizon. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, these is something I am definitely not accustomed to. Second, there are no skyscrapers or large bodies of water to break up the monotony of endless farmland and the occasional cattle farms. I’ll get more to those cattle farms later.
As we headed south, more and more storms began to pop up, some with severe warnings. Though we couldn’t catch them before they died down after sunset, we got some great pictures of one severe storm ahead of us. Amazingly, this thing was still centered around 100 miles from where we were.
Here’s another picture, closer to sunset. Note the giant anvil, the mammatus clouds under its base, and the dark line of clouds leading into the storm. The anvil marks the location of the “equilibrium level,” which is the level where the environmental temperature becomes equal to the temperature of a rising air parcel, meaning the air parcel is no longer positively buoyant and thus ceases rising. The mammatus clouds are caused by cool pockets of air sinking from the storm, and they are often, though not always, associated with severe thunderstorms due to their propensity for forming under environments with strong wind shear.
And about those cows… there are a ton of cattle farms over here, and they all smell TERRIBLE. After going through a few small farms and experiencing some most unpleasant odors, Joey and I saw an absolutely massive farm on the horizon and simply braced ourselves for the worst. The stench coming from that farm defied words. I was gasping for “cleaner” air at the next smaller cattle farm ahead, but Joey was able to tough it out. When we checked into our motel at quaint Garden City, Kansas for the night, we were initially greeted by a terrible stink once again, but within an hour the wind switched direction and we were blessed with a temporary reprieve from the stench of cow dung.
Today looks to be a more active storm chasing day with “slight” probabilities for severe weather throughout the western Kansas/Oklahoma/Texas corridor. I’ll have a new blog up tomorrow!