NOTE: I made two Stormbruiser pages for this day. This one is the general “chase” summary with images. The other page for May 20th is devoted to the spectacular and colorful storm images acquired around sunset (between Pratt and Kingman).
Today was a somewhat marginal chase day. Strong to perhaps severe storms appeared probable, but conditions were not favorable for tornadoes. Of course, with the tour group and a Weather Channel camera crew with Jim Cantore depending on my expertise, it isn’t a question of whether we are chasing, but where!
Pasted below is my account, written late in the evening:
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Our group targeted an area not too far southwest of Great Bend, which was convenient because we started the day in Great Bend. A lobe of decent CAPE was forecast to poke northward towards Greensburg, and the wind field late morning indicated a wind convergence and low-level circulation just east of DDC. N-S linear junk went up a county or two west of Great Bend early afternoon, and we moseyed on down to the tail-end cell near Greensburg. It had its moments as it moved NE, but it eventually fizzled as a new tail-end cell developed. This cell had a great low-level look for 10 minutes between Pratt and Preston, and then became outflowish with a large blocky non-rotating wall cloud. This cell dragged us NE a little, and we let it go to drop south again to get in front of a new tail-end cell near Pratt. This one was able to maintain a decent supercell look for quite a while, and it moved slowly east instead of moderately fast to the NE, like the others. It sported occasional shallow wall clouds, but never made a serious attempt at tornado production. As it drifted east to Cunningham, its large and medium-wet RFD loomed over U.S. 54 and a breath-taking TEN COMMANDMENTS sky materialized towards sunset. The colors and cloud patterns and structure and lighting in and around that RFD cut were absolutely insane! I filled up a bunch of camera cards, and I hope to get a free day soon to look the images over and to post some.
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The images above were likely taken somewhere in Edwards and/or Kiowa counties, not too far from Greensburg. Below is a cell which sported a rotating updraft for little while near Preston, northeast of Pratt.
The cell pictured above wimped out, and we dropped south to a new cell between Pratt and Cunningham (near Cairo). This was the view to the west.
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