May 24, 2011 Chase Update

Wow—a very active severe weather pattern has descended upon the Plains states, and our tour has been very busy for the previous four days.  It is Tuesday morning, May 24, and we have awoken in the middle of a “high risk” here in Guthrie, OK.  Here is a brief summary of the past four days.  Images will have to come later. as usual.  You can check Brian’s site for some images during this timeframe:

On May 20, we were on a supercell just east of Pratt, KS.  It wasn’t tornadic, but we were on the back end of the cell and observed an amazing and colorful and stormy sunset scene.  And just to make sure I get this message through to you readers loud and clear — THE COLORS WERE INSANE!

On May 21, we were treated to a furiously rotating supercell with a persistent and wildly rotating wall cloud over Topeka, KS.  It produced a couple of brief tornadoes, which we may or may not have seen — we were battling our way around Topeka and were not sure if the funnel clouds we were seeing were touching down or not.  But, we had one stop that was very close to the wall cloud, and saw many funnels.  The structure of this beast was very nice!

For May 22, we targeted SE KS, and wound up on the cell that eventually hit Joplin.  But, we were behind the tornadic part of the storm and caught another tornado farther south, at Southwest City, MO.  We were a mile or so away and heard the roar of the tornado!

And, yesterday, May 23, we witnessed the Okeene, OK tornado from a few miles away while standing in rain and looking west from several miles north of Okeene.  This was a slender tornado with a nice debris whirl that lasted a few minutes.

Pasted below are chase summaries that I wrote up for a chase e-mail group.  The first one is for the Topeka day, the second one is for the Joplin/Southwest City MO day:

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May21

Quite an amazing supercell and chase around Topeka today. This version will be somewhat short as we just got into the motel in Emporia at 1 a.m. —- we had to wait for tornadic storms to clear out of the way this evening. Our target area of I-70 in the eastern 1/3 of KS around Topeka worked out well, and we were just SW of TOP as a cell organized and approached the city. Structure improved markedly as it moved towards Topeka’s south side, and a persistent and low wall cloud teased the ground. We watched from the east side of Forbes Field (AFB). The action area shifted to our NW, and a funnel cloud or two came and went. We re-positioned to the NE side of Topeka, and observed what looked to be a tornado to our NW about 5 miles during this leg, but apparently there was no official report of one. I really thought that part of Topeka was getting hit. But, we had only intermittent views due to trees and terrain and buildings.

A very persistent and violently rotating wall cloud continued over the city, and we came up to its south edge just east of Tecumseh. Rotation and motion was wild and tornadic funnel clouds would make brief appearances, and quickly disappear. This seemed to be the theme of the day for this cell —- awesome structure and low-level rotation in the wall cloud, with funnel after funnel, but it refused to bring violent rotation to the surface. The Kansas River was in the way, and we finally found a crossing to the north side at Lecompton. We went east to Perry and north again, with a great look at the storm structure and wall cloud, which always seemed to be hovering more than half of the way down from cloud base to ground. The RFD became quite wet, blocked our view of the wall cloud, and that’s when tornado reports started to come in. I never witnessed a circulation on the ground on this chase day. We watched the supercell drift off to the NE at sunset, south of Oskaloosa. Another supercell or two skirted by just to our north while I made room reservations —– Topeka was full, Ottawa was full, finally Emporia had 12 rooms for our group, barely.

An intense tornadic supercell plowed eastward just north of I-35 from Emporia to Reading after dusk, hitting Reading and causing great damage, apparently. When we got south to view the storm southwest of Ottawa, it had weakened considerably. Other new tail-end cells towards Emporia distracted us and we had to get out of the way of one, by diving south to Waverly.

Saturday was a crazy, crazy chase day!

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May 22

Brian Morganti, Chris Gullikson, Chad Cowan, Tank Dickson and I targeted extreme SE KS on Sunday, and positioned ourselves in front of the Parsons, KS supercell. This storm went up a little early, around 2 p.m. It was backbuilding and raining in the same area for quite a while, and, though tornado warned, was severely undercut by its cool outflow. The eastern flank began moving eastward into uncontaminated air by 5 p.m. and evolved into the tornadic supercell that hit Joplin. We were on the west side of the “Parsons” cell at about 5 p.m., and it was too late to be able to get to the Joplin cell.

We targeted new storm towers which were visible to our south and SSW. These were moving east and I was not confident that we would be able to get in front of one of them, given the slower roads and poor terrain we had to deal with. From Miami, OK, we went east to Seneca, MO, and then south on a woodsy road in heavy rain—route 43. We were in deep valleys or canyons with tall trees, and the storm to our SW was not looking that good, so I figured that our day was about over. We finally cleared the forest a bit and came out onto some flat-ish terrain with some clearings (without wall-to-wall trees). The storm to our west was recently tornado warned, and the velocity couplet had recently come up quickly. We had moderate rain, though, and the view to the west was murky and sketchy. We could see a storm base from time to time, but that was about all. The rain let up a little and we had a burst of strong SE winds. This was on a hilltop near a Shamrock convenience store about a mile and a half north of Southwest City, MO. The rain let up almost entirely, and, about 4 or 5 minutes after we had reached this spot, a large tornado emerged out of the murk and rain to our WNW! This was a fairly beefy stovepipe that was cloaked in a sheath of lower clouds. We could only see the bottom 500 feet or so of the tornado. It was perhaps two miles away and moving east rather slowly. Soon, the contrast improved, and an obvious roar/deep jet engine sound was emanating from the cyclone. I had never heard such a pronounced and loud tornado roar before, and I thought that there was no way the roar could be that loud since the tornado was still a little over a mile away —- but it was. We had a minute or two with the good look to our NW—-Chad called 911 and the sirens in town were sounded quickly. I tried to get out a spotternetwork report but could not connect. The tornado became rain-wrapped just to our north and we had leaves falling from the sky. I was concerned that the tornado might drift south towards us, so we scooted east a half mile and stopped again. To our NW was a fantastic slender white tornado, which roped out a minute or two later into a gray “dental-floss” rope.

The road to the east looked worse and worse in terms of forest and hills, so we stuck around Southwest City to wait for another supercell. This one gave us a burst of strong easterly inflow winds and some broad low-level rotation, but it continued east without a tornado. In heavy rain and occasional 1.5 inch hail, we found some destroyed “stuff” near a home right on the OK/MO border about two miles north of Southwest City, and about 1.5 miles from where we had viewed the storm. An emergency responder was there. I believe three people had been injured and other houses destroyed or damaged nearby.

On our way to Grove we battled very heavy rain and occasional hail, and made it back to Tulsa around midnight.

We had a cameraman from TWC with us on the chase, and his video of the Southwest City tornado is airing today on TWC. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the good folks in Joplin.