High Plains supercells, surprise tornado – May 25, 2010

We got out of the Dodge City motel just before 11 am and started southwest.  Overnight convection really did a job on the atmosphere and the sky showed it as we left.  It didn’t much feel like a severe weather day and the low clouds were flat and dull.  Winds however, were still rather brisk out of the southeast and we anticipated that things would turn around by late afternoon.  After a lunch at the Dodge House, we made a stop at the wind farm near Montezuma to kill a little time.

We were a little surprised that storms started forming as quickly as they did near the western edge of the better low level moisture.  First radar echoes appeared before 2 pm and we started a more west jog near Moscow.  At 2:28 pm, radar showed that the storm at the north end of a short line segment was becoming strong as it moved toward Southwest Stanton County.  Shortly after 3 pm, the storm generated a wall cloud with steady rising motion and some rotation completely appear like a tornado was imminent, it did peak our interest for a short time.  We followed the storm a little farther north before it gave up on us just before 4 pm.

Our options at that time seemed somewhat limited and we decided to start south toward the Western Oklahoma Panhandle and Northwest Texas Panhandle where convection looked steady on satellite imagery.  We got caught in some great Kansas road work near Elkhart which held us up for about 15 minutes.  It was during this period that we could see a lot of smoke from what was likely a rangeland fire somewhere in the Western Oklahoma Panhandle.  Little did we know that these two events would play into the remainder of our chase.
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Just after making it through the construction zone, we were able to download a radar image which showed an impressive storm had developed in Baca County,  Colorado.  The construction likely allowed us to make a move toward the Colorado storm that we might not have made if we were another 15 or 20 miles down the road.  By 5:30 pm, we had crossed into Colorado and a very impressive supercell was located not too far to our west northwest.  At least it was impressive on radar.  Visually, the smoke from the Western Oklahoma Panhandle fire was obscuring most of our view of it.  In fact, radar and GPS showed that we were only a few miles from it, even though we couldn’t see much of it, which is something that doesn’t happen very often in Eastern Colorado.  We decided to take a dirt road up the west side of the slow moving storm for a closer view.  I still get flashbacks from my dirt road experience of a couple of years ago, but the road was in good shape and we figured we could always turn around if it started getting bad.  This almost cost us dearly as the road got steadily muddier while we continued our trip down it.  Luckily, it was a very wide road and we were able to stay out of the ditches during the very long trip to Vilas.  From there, we had a paved road east back toward Kansas.

The smoke started clearing and we decided that one more dirt road might allow us to drop down to the business area of the storm.  We abandoned this thought at 6:49 pm and decided to get back to a paved road and stay on it.  We had already pushed our luck and won.  We passed back into Kansas at 6:58 pm and would spend the better part of the next one and a half hours in Southwest Stanton and Northwest Morton Counties watching the beautiful supercell move very slowly east and northeast at only around 5 mph.

We thought our show was over, but just before 9 pm, a strong updraft started increasing just to the west of the weakening old updraft.  This was located on the Colorado side of the border.  With the sun already having set, contrast back toward the precipitation area was very low, especially now that the storm had moved farther away from us.  We were getting ready to leave when Doug spotted something in the distance.  It’s easy at times like this for your eyes to play tricks on you, but I started seeing it as well.  I brought out the video camera and started shooting in night shot mode.  Sure enough, we had a Colorado tornado in there.  This lasted for about 10 minutes and while not the most spectacular part of the day, it at least made the day complete.

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