Mother nature woke form her long winter nap and decided to punish Oklahoma with a series of long lived tornadoes on March 5-6th. The Wichita area was under the gun for severe weather but for most of the day, the storms remained either on the cold front or in Oklahoma.
Our lone Mark on this map was a one-inch hail report from Butler County, to the west of Wichita.
I'd been watching radar, seeing the mess down in Oklahoma. A couple of small supercells started SW of Wichita and grew. I needed to see some lightning.
This was 6 miles west of El Dorado, looking east toward the city.
With it being night and wind quickly approaching from the cold front to the west, I went back home. There is an interesting little settler's cemetery next to I-135 and 85th street, where I shot this lighting.
Seems like the last several years, I always start my first blog of the year saying it's been a slow year. It's been cooler, dry, ridges in the wrong place, but we've had some rain. A frontal boundary set up some action for Kansas and it being a Saturday, I was able to chase.
They upgraded the convective outlook from slight to enhanced and the stage was set for north-central Kansas. My daughter and I headed to Wilson, Kansas and hung out at Wilson Lake until the storms started to initiate.
We moved back to town and closer to I-70 to head toward any interesting popups. The storms initiated and we had a good candidate to the east of us. We headed toward Russel and pulled off in a couple of small towns to watch.
The storms were quickly showing mammatus clouds.
The storms went severe and we moved south out of Russel and followed. One storm split, then absorbed another storm and became strong.
We stayed between two of the severe storms watching a couple areas of interest.
Down near Otis, Kansas, we started to see wall clouds forming.
A clear slot opened near the wall cloud, but nothing developed.
We started seeing good hail shafts coming out of the storm, and soon the dryline had crossed over limiting a lot of the severe potential and cutting the fuel from the storms.
The clouds started to fall apart and the storms more to the east became larger and more powerful.
My daughter captured some great Meadowlarks and thunder, so I recorded this. Please turn on the sound otherwise, it's a fairly boring video.
We headed back east with the storms decently ahead of us. We stopped a couple times to capture some lightning and I may post those videos or captures later. We started the long trek home with an incredible lightning show to the north and east of our location. We made it home in time to see Saline County under a tornado warning, but only a funnel was spotted and at this time, there was no damage reported.
Hopefully we will see more storms this year, otherwise it's been fairly quiet.
So we started off with the driest year on record. As of April 8th, 2014 we passed a year in the middle of the dust bowl for being the driest start.
Then yesterday storms started to fire east of Wichita almost like a bad joke. Luckily the dry line/front combo drifted back to the west firing storms and allowing us to finally get a little rain (around 0.25 of an inch). I went out a couple times yesterday to watch. When the rotation started showing up on radar, we (I took my oldest on her inaugural chase), out to central Butler county. When we started hearing about flooding west of Leon we stopped and watched this strange wildly rotating scud under a cloud. It showed rotation very briefly before attaching to the storm and becoming a wall cloud. There was very weak rotation and a couple brief, very high funnels that tore themselves apart as they formed.
Daughter's first storm pic out in the field
We stayed until dark and headed back. I nice storm was over Wichita and we finally got some much needed rain. Unfortunately, today promises a little harsher environment for some possible large storms (hail, wind, and maybe a tornado) after dark.
This seasons been quiet. Eerily quiet. Maybe not Eerily, more like boringly on the weather front. Usually this would be the height of the storm chase season and this was my 3rd chase in a lame storm season. Storms didn't seem to have much punch to them and the primary threat from the first round was 1/4" hail, with a couple interesting SCUDS floating around.
Greenwich and 96th
Hail coming in on the right.
Then as this storm passed to the north of Wichita. I Another system came in from the west. This storm brought about 50 mph but not much more.
Lightning was fairly close, so I didn't use the tripod. Notice the tiny bolt of lightning on the right.
With the large shelf cloud moving in quickly, I finally grabbed the tripod and took a quick panoramic before the winds hit. Late April and Early May usually brings the strong storms, afterwards we have the lazy summer squall lines.
Although there was a thunderstorm watch for the area, this storm surprised me with it's fierceness. I watched the small blob grow on radar screen and decided to go take a look before I had a get together later in the evening. I have a great vantage point to watch storms about two miles from my house. It's a local farm field that the hedge rows were removed and I can see way out west.
When I arrived, I noticed a definite lowering of the clouds.
The wall cloud was forming and feeding off of the huge amount of moisture to the north of it and building although rotating very slowly.
There was some radio chatter about a rear flank downdraft opening up but I never saw it. Quickly the wall cloud slimmed down and continued feeding on warm moisture.
I was in a good position with inflow directly overhead. It kept the rain from cloaking the area. The cloud slowly rotated and radar finally indicated a cause for a tornado warning. If there was a rear flank downdraft, I think it choked out the tornadogenesis as the wall cloud became smaller. As it became smaller it began to rotate.
It was rumored that the storm was moving SE instead of straight E. Unfortunately, that's where my house is.
This was to the East of El Dorado. A friend called and thought he saw a wall cloud earlier. The movie is made out of several long exposure (10 seconds or more) pictures. most pics were taken in the dark, but with all the cloud to cloud lightning, illuminated the most important part of the storm.
This is the picture that really caught my attention but I never heard a warning for Butler Co.
There is a cold comfort setting inside your house listening to the rain and thunder outside. Then a cold comfort when you realize the area they just placed the warning on is less than 2 miles away.
We ran out of Kechi to Benton through blinding rain and wind. Then it slowed down and so did we. Never a good sign. Lots of reports were coming in but we were facing an irregular phenomena. Hook echos are to produce to the SW sides of Supercells. Not smack dab on the western side. We pulled over to get some bearings and decided to run into the town of Benton. Just before we got there I took this.
Not really sure if it was a wall cloud, a scary looking cloud, microburst, or maybe one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, we decided to get a little closer.
We drove through Benton. One of the problems is due to the houses, tree, etc. there was a lot in the way of seeing what we needed to see.
We thought we saw something at the end of the street.
By the time we got to a clear place, the cloud had really broken up. As stated before, we didn't know if it was a wall cloud or just something scaring the locals.
We thought about going to Kingman since it seemed to be where the more serious storms were going to play out. I ended up heading home for a little while and never made it to Kingman. I missed the Lake Afton tornado as well.
Then the squall line decided to move in.
I ran to my usual photo spot on the highest peak of Sedgwick Co.
There is something about the sight of a good strong squall about to hit and realizing that you won't make it home in time.
It been a while since I stood out in a strong storm.
It's an interesting feeling as the wind starts off slow, then increases, and keep increases until it's whistling past the light poles like a reed and hitting an F flat. Then the rain and light hail hit, and I had enough.
I was disappointed that Sunday didn't quite turn out as spectacular as I had hoped. On the other hand, with the horror show they predicted, we could have had a lot worse.
Started seeing Storms initiate about 4:30. Decided to run like hell to Wellington. If we were lucky, we'd make it on the back side of the storm.
It was very overcast and there was a lot of precipitation falling around so once we were under the storm, we had some difficulty deciding where to go.
We hit Wellington and then decided to head East into Winfield. We waiting a while in Winfield hoping the storm would figure out what it wanted to do.
Off to the west I could see a "beaver tail" (an area where warm moist air feeds into a storm and gives it a lot of intensity) build. Another thing that caught my attention was the nice clear slot that had developed next to it.
We had our wall cloud.
Couldn't tell what the cloud in the center was trying to do, I don't believe it was a funnel. The wall clouds of this storm didn't survive. The storm seemed like it was attempting to organize but fell short. The wall cloud above did cause the warning for Sumner Co.
We kept chasing and I had the driver (Nichole Conard) back up for this:
The wall clouds continued to generate and created a few odd clouds like the "O" cloud.
We followed up to Oxford, where the radio was claiming the wall cloud was overhead.
It didn't last too long either. We watched as the cloud tried to rebuild and hopscotched to the East.
With the sun going down, we decided to call it off. We found Udall road and headed back. This storm went on to cause a brief tornado in or near the town of Douglass. At this time no one was reported hurt and it was limited damage.
Keep your eyes to the sky tomorrow. Round two is less than 16 hours away. They are predicting a major outbreak tomorrow. Be prepared.
