June 21st, 2020 Severe Thunderstorm

It's been an unbelievably quiet season this year.  We've seen the summer weather pattern (Omega Block Pattern) come in bringing the temperature up and essentially stopping the chance of severe weather in the plains.

A cold front draped north of the Kansas/Nebraska line and a dry line came in from the Kansas/Colorado border.  This gave us an avocado shaped convective outlook with a moderate risk which I think was the first moderate risk for Kansas this year.  I also believe we have not had any tornado watches in Kansas this year as well.  Due to the moderate risk we were eyeing Dodge City but as we left noticed a tornado warning up north caused by a landspout near Hoxie, Kansas.  

We were unaware of it just being a landspout and were drawn to this warning area.  We left heading up to the McPherson area before any storms had formed on the dryline.  For some reason, I have always been drawn to cold fronts although they tend to have low outcomes for tornadoes.  Plus, I figured we could shoot west quickly if needed.

We got into cloud cover quickly and found some Mammatus clouds

We finally made it to the storm we wanted.  The storms along the dryline had started to fire.

 The entire storm rotated as seen in the youtube video

We had a family stop us and ask if it was coming toward us.  At the time it was mostly stationary but I mentioned that can change quickly, and it did,  The storm started moving south as the cold front moved.

 We did have to change location as a hail core was evident on radar.  They had reports of 3.5 inch hail from the storm but I did not see any.  The storm itself started falling apart but continued the hailcore and we decided to go west to catch the dryline.  After seeing reports that it wasn't doing anything and seeing that it was becoming a squall line, we decided to head home.

 Quick panoramic grab with my phone.

We made it home about an hour before the storm hit.  It seemed to slow down and reorganized.  We were briefly under a severe thunderstorm warning in Sedgwick County, but that was canceled as the southern parts of the squall powered up and had a brief tornado warning in Oklahoma  We ended with a fairly gentle rain and thunder.