Reports from the Last Two Months Part 1

Last time I posted, Andrew had just arrived and we were both excited about the month of May. This is typically the most active month in the plain states for severe weather. However, this year was absolutely awful. What occurred was what the storm chasing folks called a "ridge fest." Basically this meant that in the upper levels of the atmosphere a large ridge of high pressure was "blocking" any developing troughs from reaching the lower 48. The jet stream, which aids in the development of large scale upward motion, was none existent in the Central plains for about 2 weeks time. This of course occurred when I finally finished school and had an entire week of work off. Instead of driving out to the middle of nowhere watching convection build in the late afternoon, we were left watching lovely boring blue skies.



However, prior to the "ridge fest" we did get two chases in together. The first chased occurred on Friday May 1st, 2009. Our target location was Wichita Falls, Texas. As I woke up at 7 am that morning I started saying to myself, "I cannot believe I'm driving 8 hours to see storms", but in all honestly it was not a bad first chase at all. We arrived in Wichita Falls around 3 pm with the first storm showing up southwest of Wichita Falls. We raced southward as I predicted at least a few more storms to develop along a weak frontal boundary. Sure enough we ended up intercepting a decent supercell near Seymour, Texas.

Here is an image of the surface chart at 4 pm for the Texas Panhandle. Note the large temperature gradients as well as a dry line in place (a 19 degree dewpoint vs. 50!)


Although no tornadoes did form, We did witness a good structured wall cloud producing some weak rotation. We also caught a very brief (seconds only!) gustnado on Andrew's camera. Gustnadoes are produced by a thunderstorm's gust front and are seen as quickly rotating spin ups of dust. However, this storm would die off very quickly as the cold front pushed southward bring much cooler dry air thus "killing off" instability in the atmosphere.

Here are some images I took of that day. Please disregard the weird effects my camera does (although it looks cool not what I really wanted)


Following that day, we were presented with a few opportunities to chase but the month of May is not only busy for storm chasers but also college students. With that in mind I dropped Andrew off with his friend Nick from Nebraska. On May 13th they intercepted a EF1 Tornado that went through the town of Kirksville, Missouri. Here is the best image of that tornado from them:
video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsUNqn-I1j8

On Friday May 15th just 2 days after Andrew intercepted the Kirksville tornado, Nick and Andrew drove back down here to Lawrence. The setup was looking good earlier in the day of Lawrence, but by the time they arrived here the storm was already on top of Lawrence. We then travelled south to Ottawa, Kansas jumping on I-35 in hopes of seeing some interesting outflow from the storm. However, we only witnessed a weak boundary of shelf clouds and soon just endless amounts of ordinary rain.

After this quick chase the great "ridge fest" of 2009 began and thus my adventures with Andrew with me were done. However, June has been a much better month for severe weather. A detailed report of what I've seen in the month comes tomorrow in part 2 !