Weatherscapes

If you’re out and about in Sacramento for the Second Saturday art walk on July 12, please stop by the McMartin Realty office and check out my booth. The outdoor venue is on K St. between 20th and 21st streets. I’ll be showing seven framed pieces, and will have plenty of smaller matted images available for sale. I will be showing my work in August as well. I hope to see you there!

A high risk of severe storms was forecast by the Storm Prediction Center today.  The area extended from Oklahoma northward to southern Minnesota, and all modes of severe weather were predicted.  We blasted east from Goodland KS in the morning, and by the time we reached Hays, storms were already forming.  They were taking on a linear appearance, which wasn’t good for tornadoes.  They were also moving at 50 mph or faster, which wasn’t good for visibility or chasing.  Sheesh…what to do?

We decided to get ahead of the developing line and camp out to watch the individual cells blast by.  This was marginally-successful, as we watched some strong rotation go by near Bennington, KS.  But overall it was a bust, thanks to fast storm motion, linear storm mode, and unfavorable chase terrain (hills and trees of northeastern KS).

In Salina, the three amigos decided to cut off the chase.  Manross headed back to OKC, and Al and I caravaned west.  I stopped to take some pics of a pretty storm in Gove County, KS, but otherwise, my convective pursuits are done for the year.  I’m heading back to California, stopping for various photography opportunities along the way.

As an aside, the Safemark repair shop in Scott City, KS is highly recommended.  We rolled in here on Tuesday with a compressor problem, and they were very kind to us when they had every opportunity to take advantage of us.  Their names escape me now, but the three mechanics that helped us out were fantastic.  Thanks Safemark!

After getting the vehicle repaired in Scott City, we moseyed around central KS for a while until it was apparent that the cap was suppressing everything. Some cirrus moving over the area was helping to keep convection down as well. There were storms in southern NE, so we headed toward Holdredge, NE to catch them.

We made great time in getting there, so we headed west toward the storms.  This was a similar route that I had taken the week before, so I warned Kev about the NHP patrols here.  The storms were severe-warned, but looked very cold and outflowish.  Not really what we want for tornadoes.  So we re-evaluated, and decided to head southwest toward a couple of tornado-warned storms near McCook, about 100 miles southwest of where we were.

I plotted a course through Gosper and Frontier counties, and was surprised by an unpaved state highway.  But it was well-maintained, so despite the heavy rains, it was really quite passable.  Near the town of Stockville, the first storm came into view.  Oh my, was it pretty.  There was a barrel-shaped updraft region, beautiful cloud striations, and a dark green hail core.  It was tornado-warned, and heading for the town of Curtis, which was just NW of us.  We watched the storm for a while, and succeeded in killing it (Manross and I have a knack for doing that).

We dropped south after another storm, but it was merging with more convection to its south and becoming linear.  Again, not really what you want for tornadoes.  So we stopped to take some lightning pics, then headed down to Goodland KS (again) for the night.

We left Goodland and targeted south-central KS, namely the Medicine Lodge area.  Severe chances were marginal today, and hopes weren’t really high for tornadoes.

Around Oakley, Kevin noticed that the A/C wasn’t running very cold.  We headed south on US83 toward Scott City, and the A/C still wasn’t cold.  We also noticed a grinding sound coming from the engine.  Ruh roh.  We found a repair shop in Scott City, and the mechanic directed us to an A/C repair place on the west side of town.

This put us down for the day, so we found a motel.  It was a scary place.  Let’s just leave it at that.

The day was not completely lost, however.  Some storms rolled through the area in the evening, and we could still drive out a few miles, so we went north out of town to take some pics.  We ended up getting some really nice shelf cloud pics, and some fantastic lightning.

Started out in Goodland on Monday, looking to hang around the area for a while and wait for storms to get going.  The target as of late morning was the NE panhandle, so we headed that way shortly after noon MDT.  However, enhanced cumulus development, along with merging outflow boundaries, pulled us back south to I-70 in eastern CO.  A storm soon developed right over Burlington, CO, and quickly went severe.

We hauled south to catch up, but were too far north to get there before it moved across the state line into KS.  The storm was producing grapefruit-sized hail over I-70 in Kanorado, KS.  We headed east toward the storm, but it met a rapid demise as it left the boundary convergence that helped it form.

Our friend Al works at the NWS office in Goodland, and he has a nice farmstead north of town, so we went there for brats and beer.  That ends Day 8.

After 2 days of visiting family and friends in MO, I headed back west on Sunday to meet up with Kevin Manross in Salina, KS.  The plan was to leave my car in SLN and travel west with Kev toward Goodland, KS, for possible supercell storms later in the day.  We met up in SLN around 1 p.m., loaded stuff into his vehicle, left my info with the truck stop personnel, and headed west.

We turned north in Burlington, CO, on US385 and pushed on to Julesburg, CO as a storm intensified to our northwest.  This storm was pushing southeast through the Nebraska panhandle, and was still about 30 miles NW of us when we first caught sight of the base.  The storm motion would bring it over the town of Chappell, NE, so we stopped just west of that town to watch as it approached.

The storm was pretty high-based, so the tornado threat wasn’t all that high.  However, the storm structure was fantastic, easily the prettiest storm I’ve seen on this trip.  We stayed just ahead of it, stopping every few miles and taking pictures.  The storm developed a new wall cloud south of Julesburg, then turned a little more east toward the town of Venango, NE.  We turned east as well, brushing the precip core.  About 5 miles east of town, we watched the RFD blast down into a field, and a tight dust whirl appeared near the road.  The whirl moved due north, and wasn’t attached to the cloud base, so it was likely a gustnado.

We cut off the chase here and headed to Goodland for the night.