June 8, 2011 SE ND to NE KS Bust

As Vin Scully would say, “We ran a long way only to wind up with a handful of empty.”  We needed to blast south from Wahpeton, ND, to reach the weak boundary around the IA/MO/NE/KS area.  Eastern Iowa looked to have slightly better hail and tornado prospects, and there was a severe risk on the high terrain of Eastern CO along the I-25 corridor north of DEN, but those areas were fairly distant and the prospects just not that great to make a longer drive worthwhile.  My mid-morning forecast thinking:

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Regarding the upslope prospects that Tim Marshall was asking about, I find it difficult to get too excited about a WY/CO chase in early-mid June with dew points below 50F. Today’s RUC shows nothing but 30s and 40s dews over E CO and SE WY. There will likely be some pretty but relatively scrawny rotating updrafts near I-25. Given the High Plains drought conditions south of I-70, I have been avoiding E CO this spring. I have a High Plains bias, but I would much rather chase in areas with moist soils.

So, today we begin in Wahpeton, ND, and will dive south on I-29 towards OMA. From there I will have to decide where to play along the cold (or stationary) front. First guess is close to the extreme NW corner of MO, between Auburn NE and Clarinda IA. Apparently there are a lot of flooding issues in that area (esp. SW IA) to be aware of, according to a friend of mine from Lincoln.

With forecast CAPES of 2500-plus and 500 flow WSW at 40 knots along the boundary, a severe storm/supercell would seem likely, at least early on before a linear mode becomes established. We may have to work our way SW along the front into NE KS to find a tail-end Charlie.

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On our way south from Council Bluffs on I-29, we viewed some healthy CBs to the east towards Des Moines—maybe 50 miles away.  A “playing catch-up” chase didn’t sound like much fun, but perhaps there might be some additional development farther southwest towards extreme SW Iowa.  We tried to exit I-29 and to find a decent road to the east (this was a little south of I-80), but we ran into problems getting on our way eastbound due to flooding closures and construction near Glenwood.  So, we continued south, and I gave up on the idea of blasting east towards the storm development.  There seemed to still be a decent chance of something special going up towards Falls City and vicinity, and we continued south into NW MO, and then SE NE, and finally NW KS.  CAPE values were quite high here and models indicated some big storms before dark, but they did not materialize.  We had dinner in Holton and stayed in Topeka for the night.  As it turned out, we didn’t miss out on much as the IA and CO storms were, shall we say, run-of-the-mill.  I took zero video and stills on this dud chase day.