Day 3 Chase Summary

Thunderstorms, Tornado

Amarillo TX, to Guymon OK, to Elkhart KS, to Richfield KS. Return to Guymon OK for overnight.

Our first chase, and we got up close and personal with a brief tornado on the ground...

We started off in Amarillo with the intention of driving up into the OK panhandle in order to position for activity later in the day in that area and southern Kansas.

After arriving in Guymon at lunchtime, we stopped for a review of the data. The skies were mostly clear, with not much convection in sight. Studying GRLevel enabled us to pick up on cells that were firing in New Mexico, but whilst these were heading in our direction they were a long way away.

Then we noticed a cell firing up in SE Colorado that looked like it was tracking eastward into the extreme SW Kansas, which was about an hour away from our location. Game on! We stowed the gear and headed off on our first intercept.

About 20 minutes into the drive we noticed a big anvil coming out of the haze to our ENE. We headed up into Kansas, tracking the storm on GRLevel in order to pick an intercept point. We headed up to Richfield KS, and parked up to take a look at the storm. By now it had grown considerably, but had split into two cells, which meant the activity was dimished as the cells robbed each other of valuable energy. It was also back-building to the SW. It was by now producing 1" hail, so we needed to make sure we were in a safe position to avoid the hail core.

Then we noticed a line of very rapidly building cells off to the north, heading toward Garden City KS. We made the mistake of abandoning our intercept cell and heading north to try and pick up on one of these new cells, as our storm seemed to be weaking after splitting. We soon realised that the drive would take too long to get to these northern storms, as their movement was taking them away from us, so we'd always be playing catch-up with them.

We headed back to Richfield, and decided to retrace our steps further east to intercept our original storm. We parked up (by a major gas pipeline - hmmmm) and watched as the southern cell of the split rolled in toward us. It seemed to really intensify before our eyes, and CC and CG lightning increased in frequency. The cloud structure was looking really crazy, and seemed to be building southwards over our location. Lots of movement in the clouds - always an interesting sign.

I was videoing an interesting disturbance in the cloud base to the north when I heard Neil shout somehting about a tornado on the ground! He was looking west - into relatively clear air - and sure enough there it was! Lots of debris being thrown up on the ground, and as I watched a debris vortex spun up toward the clouds above - absolutely incredible. The downside was that it was about a mile away, and was showing little sideways movement - always a bad sign, as this would indicate that the chances are that it is coming straight toward you. Discression took the better part of valour, and as the car was pointing in the direction of the twister we decided to get the hell out of Dodge!

Its tricky to make out as its a still from a video, so apologies for the quality. This image shows an arrow pointing to the vortex:

And this video shows what effect it had on us tornado virgins:
(Warning: contains very strong language! Lucy: not suitable for Emily - Daddy says "fluff" a lot)

We then headed south to get out from under the danger area. Then we noticed some more ground disturbance ahead on our right:

This disturbance dissapated quickly, and we drove on. Back in the OK panhandle, we then headed east, flanking the storm as we headed back toward Guymon where we spent the night. We saw some night lightning from cells rumbling away to our north east, but nothing came over us.

Roll on tomorrow!