04.10.11
Chase #3 Review
Storms in Kiowa County, Kansas, near sunset
I didn’t want to go all the way up to Iowa yesterday (check out the tornado reports), but there was a marginal chance for storms along the dryline from west central Kansas through northwest Oklahoma.
Jeff Makowski and I drove up to northwest Oklahoma early yesterday afternoon, and sat for a while in a large parking area at the intersection of US highways 281 and 412 (east of Woodward, north of Seiling, southwest of Alva).
We hung out there for some two and a half hours or more, watching cumulus along the dryline attempt to bubble up, only to get mixed out and dissipate. The surface dewpoints started in the low 60s, but mostly mixed out to the upper 50s by later in the day. It was also pretty windy, and a lot of dust got kicked up around us.
Close to 6 pm, we decided to go north on 281 up to Alva, to find some food and air conditioning. Almost no sooner did we start to go north than we saw a cumulus cloud start to grow outward as well as upward, corresponding with the first blip of the day (for the area) on radar.
We picked some gravel roads to drive on for a while, as shortcuts to the Kansas border, in an effort to intercept the growing storm. This little shower dissipated fairly quickly, but a few more tried to get going there as well. We saw a coyote run across the road somewhere around the border.
Another random note from about this time is we heard a radio station that was playing Alvin and the Chipmunks’ “Christmas Don’t Be Late”. Astonished to hear Christmas music on the radio in early April, we continued to listen long enough to hear the DJ come on and declare how he loved Christmas, and would start to play Christmas blues music (which he did, and then we changed the channel).
By the time we crossed over into Kansas, a couple of elevated thunderstorms had moved just north of Coldwater. The photo above was taken between Medicine Lodge and Pratt, as we were driving north on US Highway 281. The main storm is on the right side of the photo, with the southern storm in the middle. This photo did not do the scene justice, as the sun very nicely lit up this convection just before setting.
We started to see lightning about this time; we saw quite a bit of intracloud and anvil lightning, with a few cloud-to-ground strikes.
These two storms pretty much combined after this, and raced away to the northeast. When we arrived at Highway 50, near St. John, we headed east to go back to I35. As we drove along on 50, we saw quite a bit more lightning as it started to get dark. The storm didn’t last too much longer after sunset, though.
All in all, the day went about as expected, although I didn’t expect to end up so far north in Kansas (I didn’t think I’d go north of Wichita, or even Wellington)! Despite traveling farther than I’d hoped, it was still a good day in that we saw a couple of decent thunderstorms (the main one may have briefly been a supercell, but we never confirmed if it was rotating or not) and some more mammatus and lightning.
I won’t be chasing today, as the southern target is too far east for me, but I am looking forward to the next chase opportunity for the Southern Plains, which hopefully could be sometime later this week!
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