Storm Chasing Days 6-10: Lots of Driving, Damaging Hail, and Chasing the Wrong Storm

Here are the last 5 days of our storm chasing trip from early June. I apologize profusely for not getting these out in a timely fashion!

Day 6 (Saturday 6/2/2018)

With no storms in the vicinity for the next two days, we decided to take it easy and hang out in Grand Island. As we had done for all but one of our nights, we stayed in the Days Inn. This one was right next to the Quality Inn (which was presumably of higher quality), but we got free admission to their breakfast buffet, which had all sorts of fresh fruit and some really great scrambled eggs. Fresh fruit tends to take a back seat to Chicken McNuggets and Reese’s Blizzards when you are storm chasing, so this breakfast was particularly refreshing.

Most of the day was simply dedicated to analyzing the data/pictures/notes we took on Friday, but we did watch Twister later at night, if for no other reason than to claim that we had seen at least one tornado on our trip. Twister has a cult following among meteorologists in a way “The Day After Tomorrow” doesn’t have (though in all fairness, Sharknado comes close), likely because storm chasing is a pretty unique activity and storm chasers are pretty unique people. Nobody exemplified this more than “Dusty,” an unkempt and geeky adrenaline junkie played by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman who injected a healthy dose of energy into a rather bland cast.

We also watched a National Geographic documentary (available on Youtube here) on the El Reno, Oklahoma tornado of May 31, 2013: a 2 1/2 mile-wide, multiple vortex tornado with maximum wind speeds of 295 mph. The El Reno tornado was the widest tornado on record and had the second-highest wind speeds behind the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado of 1999, but it is particularly notable in the storm chasing community for killing four storm chasers and injuring several others (including Reed Timmer from the Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chasers” and The Weather Channel’s Mike Bettes) as chasers were caught off-guard by its size, subvortices, and erratic movement.

Day 7  (Sunday 6/3/2018)

Unfortunately, Sunday was also a storm-free day, but with storms in the forecast for Monday over the Texas Panhandle, we at least had something to do: drive 400 miles south Liberal, Kansas so that we wouldn’t have to do a bunch of driving tomorrow morning. After filling up on another complimentary breakfast buffet at the Quality Inn, we went to Walmart to stock up on some ice and cherries and pick up a new SD card and subsequently went to a nearby Starbucks to make a game plan for the day. Here, I showed Chris and Joey the very clunky code I use to make my weather model charts (you can find the charts at http://weathertogether.net/models and the code at https://github.com/WeatherTogether).

After our stop at Starbucks, Joey and Chris got some food to-go at Taco Bell (I held off, as I personally can’t stand Taco Bell). After that, we set our sights on Liberal and began our long trek southward.

Along the way, we drove by “Funk, Nebraska.” If I’m ever so lucky to be able to have multiple residences, one of them is going to be in Funk. With tornadoes, a world-class largemouth bass fishery in Harlan County Lake to the north, and a presumably fantastic music scene, I can’t think of a better place to spend my springs. However, we also passed by “Friend, Kansas” a little further south the road, so that’s definitely a contender if the real-estate market in Funk is a little overheated. I don’t see that happening any time soon, for better or worse.

We also passed by an extremely long car show just south of Funk. I’d estimate there were approximately 200 cars, with most of them being classic 1950s American muscle cars. None of us are particularly versed in American muscle cars, but we recognized a lot of Ford Mustangs and a Corvette or two in there. There was even a purple Volkswagen Beetle.

After a quick stop in Norton, Kansas to get some Blizzards at the town Diary Queen and another quick pit stop in Oakley, Kansas, we didn’t stop until we reached our final destination of Liberal late that night. We’re looking forward to a big day tomorrow.

Day 8  (Monday 6/4/2018)

Day 8: After absolutely nothing on our 6^th or 7^th day, we were looking forward to some action on the 8^th. Unfortunately, we saw no action whatsoever, as an MCS (mesoscale convective system) had blossomed the previous night and persisted through the morning hours, keeping morning temperatures lower than forecast and preventing us from breaking through the capping inversion over the area. It’s a shame too, as we had some of the ingredients for at least a slight chance of tornadoes, with good wind shear and a stark dryline to initiate convection. Still, we made the best of a bad scenario and got to do some fun things during the day.

The highlight of the day was our visit to Palo Duro State Park, which is about 40 minutes south of Amarillo. The mainstay of Palo Duro State Park is Palo Duro Canyon, which is the second-largest canyon in the United States after the Grand Canyon. It was soooo refreshing to finally get out of the car and have some relaxing time in nature. The view was breathtaking, with sculpted cliffs and a hodgepodge of semi-arid shrubbery painting the landscape.

We also met up with Chris’ friend Cameron Venable, who he originally met via a Californian online weather community. Cameron is a TV meteorologist for KDFA-TV (channel 10) in Amarillo and graduated with a degree in meteorology from San Jose State in 2015. Cameron  does storm chasing both for his job and on his own and saw the rotating supercell we saw on Monday when it was at its maximum intensity. He’s super nice and knowledgeable and is a great broadcaster; be sure to like him on Facebook/follow him on Twitter.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cvenablewx/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cvenablewx

Day 9  (Tuesday 6/5/2018)

We finally had a little storm action on the 5th. It wasn’t much, but after three days of absolutely nothing, we weren’t in a position to complain.

We started our day with a very filling breakfast at “Ye Olde Pancake Station” in Amarillo. I was skeptical that they would truly have the “world’s best pancakes;” after all, how hard is it to make a pancake? But there really was something special about their pancakes, and the bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns were on point too. I’m thoroughly convinced that anything that has “Ye Olde” in the name is quality – “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop” along the Seattle waterfront is the best curiosity shop I’ve ever come across. Actually, it’s the only curiosity shop I’ve ever come across, but it’s still a great place.

After we had stuffed ourselves full of syrup, saturated fat, and highly-enriched grains, I gave the Amarillo NWS office a call to get their thoughts on where the best location to catch a supercell would be. The first words that came out of the forecaster’s mouth were something along the lines of ‘well, we’ll have to see if we even get a supercell,’ which may explain my dispirited countenance.

The forecaster said the area with the most favorable conditions for storm development was approximately 30 miles east of Amarillo by Groom, so we decided to head 70 miles east to McLean, Texas to get ahead of any potential storms that would form. We got into McLean around 2 pm, and after looking at the latest model runs, we backtracked 15 miles west to Lake McCleallan to get some nice timelapse shots of the cumulus clouds building over us. Lake McClellan quite lovely; we were greeted by three turkeys on arrival and I dipped my toes in the lake, which was running very low due to the drier-than-normal conditions over the Texas Panhandle this year.

A storm soon formed slightly southeast of McLean near Samnorwood, so we cut east on route 66 from Lake McCleallan to chase it. But within minutes of us beginning our chase, we saw a giant dust devil to our left and hooked south on Highway 273 to go see it. Though the dust devil weakened before we got to it, we ended up intercepting it perfectly. We were overjoyed to have not only witnessed, but gotten directly hit by a twisting column of air, no matter how weak it was.

The storm we were tracking soon lost its chutzpah, so we headed NW back towards Groom to chase some storms that had much higher tops and VILs (vertically intergrated liquid, which is a measure of the amount of liquid water  the atmosphere). On the way there, we passed through a growing but much smaller thunderstorm.

What was incredible about this storm was how quickly it dropped temperatures. Our car thermometer read 99 degrees before we went into the storm’s downdraft, and within 1-2 minutes, temperatures plummeted all the way to 77 degrees. Car thermometers are notoriously inaccurate, and I’m certain that a great deal of the sudden temperature drop came from liquid on the car evaporating, as the change of phase from liquid to gas requires a massive amount of energy.

Another notable aspect of this thundershower was how strong the rain smell was. Rain has a very distinct smell when it falls over dry, porous soil, as bubbles rise from the porous material when it becomes wet and release aerosols in the process. This smell is called petrichor and it is rare west of the Cascades, as our soils are not very porous and remain wet during the rainy season due to cool temperatures, little sunshine, and light but persistent rain. It is more common during summertime thunderstorms over drier areas such as Eastern Washington or Oregon.

We stopped slightly north of Groom to check out the storm we originally set our sights on and got barraged by some heavy rain and wet, squishy hail. We could see a lowering cloud base from a storm several miles to our east that looked very impressive on radar, so we decided to go check it out.

We saw a somewhat-well-defined base that had a curl of sorts, but it was clear that this storm was nowhere near strong enough to form a tornado.

We chased a few more storms throughout the night but didn’t see much of substance, and at 7:30, we decided to call it a day. But even though we were done chasing storms, we had a ton of driving to do: tomorrow’s storms were predicted to occur in northwest Nebraska/southeast Wyoming, and with only one full day of storm chasing left, we were going to do everything in our power to try and see a tornado. We drove approximately 550 miles to Fort Collins, Colorado and got into town around 2:30 AM. Even if we didn’t see anything Wednesday, we couldn’t say that we hadn’t tried.

Day 10  (Wednesday 6/6/2018)

After our super long drive Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, we caught up on some sleep and checked out of our hotel as late as possible (approximately 11 am). We headed north to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and from there, we did our daily routine of looking at weather models and calling the local NWS forecast office. We decided to head over to the southwestern Nebraska Panhandle, as there was plenty of CAPE and helicity over this area and wind shear profiles looked good for rotating supercells.

That being said, models showed storms blowing up all at once and forming an MCS (mesoscale convective system) instead of forming discrete supercells. Not only is it much more difficult to get tornadoes with an MCS, any tornadoes that do form will be rain/hail wrapped and thus are much harder to see and get to/escape from. Our goal was to get to the first storm to pop up with the hopes that there would be a brief window of time where this storm was isolated enough to grow into a powerful supercell before other storms developed around it and the whole thing blew up into an MCS.

While we were heading east on I80 towards Nebraska, we noticed that the latest runs on the HRRR (High Resolution Rapid Refresh) model showed storms popping up earlier and earlier, so we adjusted our target to the town of Alliance in the Central Nebraska Panhandle, as the storms here were more likely to, at least initially, be stronger and more isolated from surrounding storms.

By the time we had reached Alliance, storms had already began developing to our SE, and there was a towering cumulus that was primed for development to our ENE. We had a decision to make: should we chase some mature storms to our southeast that already had some rotation, or should we head east and just hope that this cumulus grows into a thunderstorm by the time we get there? It was a tough call, but we voted to go to the cumulus tower to the east. As expected, it ballooned into a powerful thunderstorm by the time we got there.

We stopped at Lakeside to get a view of the storm, and we saw an incredible, localized vortex of circulation that resembled a cinnamon roll.

From Lakeside, we headed northeast towards Ellsworth to get some pictures/a timelapse of a very pronounced cloud base.

We then decided to head west, and as we did so, we were treated to an extraordinary sight. The tail end (furthest west) portion of this cloud base began lowering dramatically and spinning rapidly. We slowed down to take a look at it (we couldn’t find any side roads), but unfortunately, we soon got into the storm’s intense “hail core.” We got smacked by half-dollar sized hail and Chris’ beloved Mazda 3 suffered several small dents to the roof. We’re all very thankful that the hail size didn’t graduate to any of the “ball categories;” golf ball, baseball, or softball. We were too busy driving to get any pictures, but we got some awesome video footage.

We saw a gustnado slightly west of Antioch at 7:22, and we stopped five minutes later to get a view of a lowering cloud base to our north. There we no easy north options from Highway 2, so we headed west to Alliance and headed north on Highway 87 to see some more rapidly-developing storms. However, these quickly weakened just like all the other storms that day, so we decided to call it a night and begin our long trek south to Limon, Colorado.

One of the more painful moments of the day was looking on Twitter and seeing some pictures of a stunning EF-3 tornado near Laramie, Wyoming, which is less than an hour NE of Cheyenne. To add insult to injury, the Cheyenne NWS forecast discussion explicitly mentioned the potential for a tornado near Laramie in the forecast discussion the previous night. Take a look.

Despite weak forcing aloft, think there 
should be enough support for convective initiation with moist low-
level upslope and excellent convergence along the Laramie Range. A 
bit concerned with the degree of capping, as soundings show a very 
stout inversion over most areas through much of the day. CAMs have 
not been particularly excited about storm coverage either, but any 
storms that do develop could be severe. Good moisture advection is 
expected with dew points climbing into the upper 50s and lower 60s 
over much of the high plains. This, combined with strong heating & 
steepening mid-level lapse rates will support SBCAPES of 3000 J/kg 
or more by late afternoon/early evening. Effective bulk shear over 
30 knots will support rotating updrafts/supercell structures which 
will be capable of large and damaging hail. In addition, low-level 
directional shear is progged to be significant and may lead to SRH 
values over 150 m2/s2 in the effective layer. That said, a tornado 
or two is certainly possible especially over far southeast Wyoming 
in Laramie and southern Platte/Goshen counties where low-lvl shear 
should be maximized during the early evening. 

Here were some of the pictures and videos that circulated on social media. The tornado remained on the ground for an hour and stayed over open terrain, causing no damage other than a few downed power lines.

Incredible #tornado north of #Laramie #wyoming today. Classic LP supercell. On the ground for one hour at least. INSANE! @NWSCheyenne @ReedTimmerAccu pic.twitter.com/8t38ZUhpSq

— Namarrgon (@Namarrg0n) June 7, 2018

EF3 tornado near Laramie, Wyoming on June 6, 201. Amazing pictures by Greg Campbell: https://t.co/DDHR3sEJRw #Laramie #tornado #wyoming via @Strange_Sounds pic.twitter.com/XA1lDM8FHI

— Strange Sounds (@Strange_Sounds) June 8, 2018

INCREDIBLE #tornado video from #Laramie, #WYwx on Wednesday. A MUST watch! pic.twitter.com/XBoyuLh0Ix

— Live Storms Media (@LiveStormsMedia) June 7, 2018

We may not have seen a tornado this trip, but we saw some pretty darn cool stuff nevertheless. And besides, this just further solidifies our plans to have a storm chasing trip next year.

Again, I’m sorry for getting this out so late! Next year, I’ll be much better with getting my blogs out in time, even if they are a little less comprehensive as a result. I’ll leave you with the entirety of the compilation of our day that Joey made.

As always, thanks for reading and supporting WeatherTogether. It means the world to me.
Charlie