Wednesday, May 28, 2008

5/23/08 and 5/24/08 Chases

North of Ness City, Kansas 5/23/08:
Starving Cu on 5/24/08 (below):

East of Ness City, Kansas on 5/23/08 (below)
Ness City meso ... very rapid, pronounced rotation in the photo below. This is the one chasers ran from as it was gusting out ... if you followed this east, then you missed what was coming up north just a few minutes later:

Mammatus near Ness City: Horseshoe structure north of Ness City (near time of tornado - the video is zoomed in closer to the tornado, but I still need to freeze a vidcap or two - the tornado actually formed on the north side of the horseshoe, where you see the low hanging white structure in the distance):

5/23/08 Log

Arrived in western Kansas late, but still managed to catch a brief show near Ness City. When we arrived, there was some sort of funky stuff going on with the cell next door and those things couldn't exactly get together and decide who was going to rotate. This is the second time in less than two weeks that a great storm has been screwed with from neighboring convection as it's getting really interesting. Not able to upload pics right now, but just west of Ness City in the "Chasecar City" that sprung up instantly there was one of the best mesos ever. Rotation almost on the scale of the Hallam storm. Getting away from that thing was like a rat race through Ness. The stream of chasers became more fun to watch than the storm at that point, believe it or not.

As we followed it north we ended up on a gravel road south of this horseshoe from hades that was one of the coolest storm structures I've seen in a long time. It was perfect. Wish we could have been just a smidge closer to the tornado, though. Was a show no matter how you were looking at it.

We ended up on this dam on a lake up there south of I-70. I'll have to go back later to see where we were exactly. But there was a brand new meso off to the west that we had been watching for a while, trying to decide if it was worth anything or not - the storm began to hook pretty good at this point on radar. As we're coming across this big dam that felt like a thousand feet off the water, I saw some little vortex spinning below us on the water's surface (gust related), and told my passengers that it would not be cool to get smacked with high wind up there and get flipped off this thing. We ended up below the dam, hunkered down and taking cover as a hefty little shear marker spun over our heads. The wind went up over hurricane strength pretty fast ... I'm thinking it may have been shooting down out of the back of the storm and maybe hitting the dam and getting funneled through our safe spot - because it hit like a ton of bricks. Stuff was hitting the car, flying through the air. I was trying to stay cool for my first-time passengers (geesh, what a night for a first chase). Then got out of the car with Fred Plowman to realize the trees beside us had snapped off - one pretty good size one was uprooted (pics coming). Had to then maneuver through the debris on I-70 in the form of several flipped rigs. Looked like one person on the westbound side was also being carried away in a stretcher ... not good.

Here's a link to the video posted by fellow chaser Andrew Prichard who was in the car just behind me during the RFD event. You can see my silver VW pull just ahead of him in the shot. I have video as well, but think Andrew's turned out better.