I got rooms in Pierre, and on the way south a cluster of very strong storms matured west and north of PIR. We managed to squeeze ourselves in between several of these very electrified storms, and we had an amazing 4th of July thunder and lightning show! Lightning in these nearly stationary storms was practically continuous. At, Pierre, around midnight, Sioux Avenue had about a foot of water on it, and we had to find an alternate path to get to the Super 8!

The images above show the towering cumulus clouds southwest of Mobridge during the late afternoon.  (This was near Trail City and Promise.  Promise is a barely-there place along BIA 7 between Trail City and La Plant.  I think it is named after the yummy buttery spread.)  It was quite miserable in the sun, with a temperature near 90F and dew point of 77F!  We drove back and forth on the road for a time to try to stay in the shade of the clouds.  We were right on the front, too, and had little or no breeze.  What do you make of this line-up of hitchhikers?

We were somewhat despondent when nothing matured in our cu field near Promise, and we took the dirt road BIA 7 south to La Plant (in case a strong storm went up farther west on 212).  I took the first two images of the four above at 6:56 p.m. MDT (0056Z), from La Plant.  The cell was — you guessed it — practically right over Promise, SD.  A little more than 40 minutes later we were just southeast of the storm, along BIA 7.  Though we heard a pronounced hail roar, I think that the storm was already weakening at this point.  In the first image of the supercell (3741), a second strong updraft can be seen on the extreme right.  It is along the front and about 50 miles ENE of our nearby storm.

The lightning pics from Route 1804 about 15 NNW of Pierre are below.  I got a little artsy with the colorful sunset shot by jacking up the foreground brightness (the same image without the drastic photoshopping is also provided) —- it looks unnatural, of course, but I thought it was worth sharing.

We are leaving VTN currently. VTN and vicinity may well be where we want to be towards sunset, but for now we are being pulled west and perhaps north a little, towards an apparent mesolow near the Black Hills. The RUC shows a nice tongue of high CAPE along the SD/NE border to our west. Shear and instability look very good later this afternoon between VTN and the southwestern edge of the Badlands area. The latest satellite pic shows a cu field near CDR.

With plenty of time to kill, we roamed off of the beaten path (U.S. 20) and checked out the little hamlet of Eli, Nebraska.  There isn’t much there except for a few houses and a church.  I photographed Chuck driving his tractor back home from midday mass.

From Eli we drifted towards the northwest and into the Badlands of SD.  A handful of cloud towers tried to go up around Batesland and Wounded Knee, but the cap held strong, to our chagrin.  We killed some more time on the southern fringe of the Badlands, near a dinky place called Rocksprings.  Some activity to the west, near the Black Hills, looked good briefly but then shriveled.  I led some of the tour guests to a hilltop, where a circle of rocks marked an alien spaceship landing site.  Storm clouds percolated in the distance to the southeast, near Valentine.  Super.

Well, it was getting a little too late to go on a wild goose chase back to VTN.  We waited near Sharps Corner for some new activity that was approaching from northwest Nebraska.  These cells threw a big anvil and some mammatus overhead, but the general trend was weakening and blah-blah-blah.  I managed to get a lightning image and a few other so-so pics, including the “kiss of death” cloud.  Our beds for the night awaited in Kadoka.

This was the final chase day for Tour 5, out of OKC, and we had to be back to OKC by noon the next day.  So, I was looking for a target within about six hours of OKC.  Fortunately, there was one — the OK Panhandle!  We started out in El Dorado, KS (a little east of Wichita), so we had a 5 or 6-hour drive to the west to make.

(By the way, our tour guest Tom Trott has some fabulous images from this particular tour, and from this chase day, on his web site “Capturing Adventure”.)

On the previous evening, I made the following forecast post, based on the evening computer model run(s):

Tonight’s NAM run for Saturday shows that wave at 500 mb (that Bob H. mentioned) cruising into SW KS around sunset time. And, it shows a splendid red blob for UVVs over SW KS at midnight. Winds at 850 and 700 crank up considerably in the vicinity of the eastern OK PH after 00Z. The theta-e axis runs from Baca County CO ese-ward towards Fort Supply, OK. Mid-60 dews are lapping at the eastern entrance of the OK PH around sunset. I suspect that a storm or two may scoot E or ESE from Baca County during the late afternoon, with a good chance for a significant increase in severity towards sunset around Elkhart/Guymon.

Around noon on this chase day I made the following observations and posted them to CFDG:

Our group has a loose tether today as we need to be back in OKC by about noon tomorrow, so we are looking primarily at the OK PH and vicinity. The 15Z RUC is kind of weak with the 500 flow—-25 to 30 knots from the west over SE CO and the OK PH. But, increasing SSE to SE flow from the surface to 850 (40 knots at 850 near GUY at 03Z) should more than compensate for that in the shear department. Forecast CAPES aren’t exactly off the charts, either. We will look for the tongue of highest dews making its way northwestward into and through the OK PH and latch onto that. The HRRR is generous with the storms in the eastern portions of the OK PH and NE TX PH by 23-00Z. 700 temps are quite a bit cooler towards Woodward, OK, compared to SE CO, and low-level moisture and CAPE may be a tad better.
We are westbound from Wichita and will be closely looking at the axis from about Baca County to Texas County to Lipscomb County. The NE TX PH play is slightly preferred given that we head back to OKC tomorrow. It looks like a great setup for spectacular supercell structure around sunset time. I’m not very bullish on tornado chances, in part due to the pre-existing drought in this region. We’ll see…

And,  I wrote a “now” post at about 3:40 p.m. CDT:

It looks like the storm to be on right now is the one that is nearly stationary and NW of Kim. It has a very nice shape, but is likely high based given temp/dew point spreads of 30 (F) or greater in the area.

My thinking of Baca County ESE into Texas County OK for the 01Z to 03Z time frame, when the stronger winds begin to ramp up, still looks good. We are late for the afternoon show in SE CO—–still heading west through Meade County KS at this time. We will fine tune from the Liberal/Guymon area.

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So, given all of the above, it is clear that I liked Texas County — the middle of the OK Panhandle.  We were headed west towards the “Kim” cell (in southeast CO), when a storm went up quickly just 30-40 miles away to our southwest, in Texas County.  Here is the account that I wrote shortly after the chase:

It was very nice to have a forecast verify and for things to work out just about as planned —– though a bunch of luck was involved and things kind of fell into place and right into our laps. I thought that some nasty supercells would move ESE from about Baca County into Texas County this evening, with the best ingredients coming together in the OK PH around sunset. Stuff went up pretty early in SE CO and approached Baca County, with the nice Kim supercell nearly stationary. We were just getting out of Greensburg after a late lunch as the Kim cell was getting good — about 200 miles too far east! We plugged away westward, aiming at the Kim cell in case nothing else happened. A CB went up fairly quickly to our southwest when we were a little NNE of Liberal. It was close to or on the boundary, and it was easy pickins for us. The Kim cell instantly became a distant memory for our crew. We got up close to the east side of the new storm south of Hugoton, on the E-W road that goes west from LBL (3 miles north of OK). The cell was very high based, with the occasional downburst of precip. The cell split once, and the south split stopped moving NNE and started to slowly drift east along the KS/OK border. GR Level showed a 4-inch hail marker in the core a few miles to our SW, so I decided that it was no longer a good idea to sample the precip core.

As we neared Liberal (maybe 10 miles west of town around 6 p.m.), the precip core to our west became very heavy, and a rain foot developed beneath the base. Some dust got kicked up and scud clouds were all of a sudden swirling around on the interface of inflow and outflow beneath the base. Strong east winds were whipping past us at our location east of the cell. In a matter of minutes, it seemed, the scud clouds attached themselves to the updraft base and the storm morphed from a ho-hum high-based hailer to a phenomenal low-based beast of a supercell. We were viewing the sculpted updraft base towards the SW while in light-mod rain, with strong ENE winds now. The thing was moving ESE, so we had to get into LBL and then south to maintain position.

At a stop about seven miles south of LBL, we had the business end directly to our west. A long plume of dust swept up to and under the low base from the NE, only a few miles away. Not too long after, we were blasted by extremely strong inflow winds from the NE, and my tripodded camcorder blew over onto its side (it still works, at least most of it). It was difficult to tell if there was much rotation with the low wall cloud due to dust being lifted into it.

After several minutes here, we had to bail south. I went right past the U.S. 64 east option to Forgan, figuring that that route would certainly lead to some sort of nasty encounters with hail, tornadoes, damaging winds, and/or Sasquatch. Seconds later I see Paul and the COD crew blast by northbound in the other direction right into the MAW of the BEAST! Yikes!

We had to blast south for several miles to clear a precip core just to our SW. After stopping again for a few minutes to look back north again, we got into the vans to reposition. It was just seconds after we got back on the road south that we looked back to the northeast to see an obvious dusty cone tornado connecting the surface and the cloud base, maybe 4 miles distant. We were about halfway between Turpin and Boyd on U.S. 83, looking NE. We quickly stopped, got out, and the tornado was no longer there—it had either quickly dissipated or had become rain-wrapped or dust-wrapped or otherwise visually indistinct. I called NWS AMA to let them know, and I think it may be my report which is in the tornado log at 0050Z in Beaver County. Unfortunately, we were unable to get any pics of the tornado, though Brian has some good ones of the action area taken a minute or two just prior to the tornado. The tornado was probably east or ESE of Turpin.

The cell continued mostly east along 64 as we went south and then east on 412. We had several good looks at the very nice HP structure around sunset, and found ourselves in a precip-free area with supercells to our NW, N, SE and S, all less than 25 miles away! The new beast of the moment after sunset (when we were near Slapout) was the one that was entering Ellis County, OK. One of the Threatnet wheelies showed 149 with that cell. All we could see was a bunch of embedded lightning. We followed it into Woodward for the night.

Okay, this blabber has become tiresome, time for some pics!  The first one below shows the young storm splitting between Hough, OK, and Hugoton, KS, right along the state line.  Later, the still relatively high-based “right split” member as a microburst-like blob develops.  Views are to the west and WSW. 

The next set of stills is of the impressive updraft “bomb” that went up (in Lipscomb County, TX) to our distant southeast as we maintained position just east of our nearby storm.

In the meantime, our “Hugoton” storm was starting to dump more and more precip, and scud clouds found themselves twisting around on the boundary between cool storm outflow and warm inflow from the east and southeast.

It didn’t take long for these scud clouds to rise and “stick” to the updraft base, and the storm began to rotate hard and became much more menacing.

The six images above were taken some four to eight miles west of Liberal, KS, and the view is to the southwest and west-southwest.  As the storm moved ESE at about 20 mph, we scooted east to Liberal and then south on U.S. 83, stopping a few miles south of the KS/OK border.  The updraft was now to our due west, and sucking up plenty of dust on very strong E-NE inflow winds:

The next step was to get out of the way, and I got these shots towards the southwest as we blasted south:

Shortly after getting south far enough, I got this shot of the action area back to the NNE, where we viewed what may have been a dusty tornado moments later:

Finally, here are a few images of the storm structure and some lightning taken from U.S. 412 south of Beaver and near Slapout:

Tour 5 began in Oklahoma City on June 5, with drivers Jon (Woody) Watson, Jennifer Dunn and Brian Morganti.  We made it up to eastern Colorado around Eads and Brandon for some high-based junky cells around sunset, and arrived at our motel in Fort Morgan late.

The chase forecast for June 6 was not clear-cut, as the timing of an approaching disturbance into MT was poor.  A slight risk area was painted from the Rockies in MT eastward through the Dakotas to WI and MI.  Tornado chances were slightly better in MT than in SD.  Here is my forecast post late morning:

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Initially I was thinking that Lame Deer, MT, would be a good starting point for today’s chase. We are expediting northward from Fort Morgan this morning and should be near Broadus by 23Z or so. The negative-tilt trough that is swinging NE-ward towards WY is a tad late (for my liking) with regard to aiding with the lift above the nice E-W CAPE axis from Billings to Broadus to Buffalo SD. But, daylight persists until 10 p.m. or so up there, and we’ll give it a go. I’m not really sure yet as to where to set up along the warm front/CAPE axis. One obvious spot is near Billings, close to the surface low. The road network around there is a little better than most areas of southeastern MT. Moisture might be quite a bit more plentiful near the ND/SD/MT triple-point near Ekalaka, and the 15Z RUC has some nice moisture convergence and a small precip signal there. Otherwise, the latest models are quite stingy with any precip at all through 02-03Z—-UGH.

We’ll continue to Belle Fourche (or Gillette) and figure it out as we go, as usual.

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and, two NOW posts around 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.:

We came up to Belle Fourche. Surface obs suggest a circulation of some sorts, or at least good convergence, just to the west of here in extreme SE MT. A small cell near Devils Tower has our interest and is moving this way, into a good environment in terms of wind and moisture and shear, but with a lot of CIN — boohoo. My expectations remain fairly low. We’ll drift NW on 212, but I’m also keeping an eye on the heavier stuff moving NE into the Black Hills.

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The severe-warned cell that is approaching Rapid City looks anemic on radar—apparently it is a high-based junky thing that is spewing outflow and warning-level winds. We will head that way anyway, as I have committed to playing W SD having just booked 15 rooms in Mobridge.

Rapid City doppler radar shows an outflow boundary moving WNW from the earlier convection that moved into SD from Cherry County. This boundary passed through Philip at 0015Z and it may interact with the storm moving out of the Black Hills in an hour or so. We will need some massive surface convergence to force a surface-based parcel through the cap northeast of RAP…perhaps an outflow boundary collision will do the trick.

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We wound up on some marginally interesting activity northeast of Rapid City.  My chase account:

Our group left Fort Morgan mid-morning, unsure where to target along the E-W CAPE axis from Billings to north of the Black Hills. The strong upper level/negative tilt trough was timed a bit late, and convection was not expected until near or after sunset (if at all) in SE MT. Given this and that we wanted to chase the system east towards ND/MN the following day, I decided to forget about the Billings-area (near the surface low) and to hope for something strong N or NE of the Black Hills. Some high-based junky stuff formed in NE WY and moved over the Black Hills towards RAP, and we intercepted it along 34 around Union Center. There were occasional heavy cores, and it was warned for strong outflow winds. An inflow band from the NE persisted for a while and the leading edge exhibited some structure. A shallow lowered area developed on the leading edge, but overall the base was high and the storm was undercut by its outflow.

It weakened towards Faith, but sporadic lightning activity kept us awake along the empty western SD roads. Brian and I managed some photos of the “tower lighting” effect with multiple “strobe” branches from a tall tower near Faith. At our pit stop in Faith, dust was getting kicked up and the temperature was 91F (in light rain) at 04Z due to heat burst effects.

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So, a day with some decent prospects wound up rather so-so.  An impressive supercell did indeed develop near Billings, with some sheriff-nado reports from 03Z to 04Z.  Here are the images from Union Center to Faith, SD:

This was the final full chase day for Tour 4.  We began in Murdo, SD, and had to be back in OKC by early afternoon the next day.  So, we had to favor a play to the south, and fortunately there was a chance of strong storms in NW KS.  We chased some high-based convection northeastward from Russell Springs to Oakley, and then stopped just east of Angelus, KS, just before sunset.  Precip beneath a line of storms to our west and northwest was lit up orange by the setting sun, with occasional to frequent lightning behind St. Paul’s Catholic Church steeple.  It was a photographer’s delight, and the guests were amazed at the deep colors and stormy look to the sky.

First —- some Tour 4 group shots, with and without the dismal countenances:

…and a pretty Kansas cliff west of Oakley…

…and the amazing sky at Angelus, Kansas, in Sheridan County.  Little to no artificial image enhancement was necessary to make the sky look the way it did here!