Day 3 UM chase to the west

Travelled over 1000 km from Lincoln NE to Garden City KS.

Miller analysis by the three chase teams was delivered to a charming family (2 truckers, a beribboned, curious and smart 4-year old daughter fascinated by the weather channel, and her purse-sized poodle with bows to match hers) and the class, the weather briefing was detailed. It was a tough decision, even for the instructors, with tons of instability that provided  many locations with strong potential for storms. However, in the end, the decision was to head west into eastern Colorado where storms might be more discrete cells and the cap on the eastern side could lift later in the day. As we headed west from rainy Lincoln (having been under big thunderstorms and very strong wind gusts overnight) to McCook area, the sky cleared then gave us a beautiful display of wave-patterned cirrus over lush green fields and forests remnant between them. As cirrus thickened into fine-grained high condensation and lower cumulus clouds), we left the flooded areas of eastern Nebraska  and the temperatures and dew points shifted from warm and humid to more pleasant. After a good lunch in sunny, warm Oberlin, KS, our path took us south to the I-70, then west to Seibert, CO. There was a good cell building high to 45000ft, that was generating reports of possible tornadoes and land spouts from chasers and police, along with hail, mesocyclone status from SPC, and a severe thunderstorm watch then warning box. That storm was heading almost straight eastward or slightly east northeast, and then turned to the right and started to show a “throat” of inflow and rotation in the doppler radar. At first it seemed a gradual mover, but as we went south from Seibert toward Kit Carson, it (and maybe me, as well) caught the speed of excitement. We stopped first on a side road heading briefly west (the first jog in highway/road 59) to feel in warm inflow and how strong the winds were carrying it toward the cell. The sky was darkening and the anvil spreading very wide. (I made the mistake of finding ‘a spot’) in an old homestead for photo and pee break, jogged back to the vehicle, realized I'd dropped the cell phone. So I jogged back in, found it and jogged back, trying not to delay the one remaining chase vehicle too much. The error was running through a ridiculous amount of speargrass, so socks and shoes put me on pins and needles, literally.) 

From there we zigzagged on gravel and dusty dirt roads, heading west then south, and west again through dry pasture and drier sagebrush-filled pasture. On the radar screen overlain with chaser markers, the highway from Limon to Aroya was like a string of beads... lots of chaser interest in this cell! We went south to Kit Carson then to Eads to fill up vans and snack quotas. The storm was passing but in the distance we could see daylight and lots of dust picked up by outflow winds, over to the east. We were waiting for a new cell to the north to develop and the plan was to intercept it on the south side as it travelled to the east southeast. Heading then toward Kit Carson in view of a rainbow to the east, we stopped briefly on a farm road in tall grass, with wildflowers, badger holes, and a snake sighting, to photograph the buildups and prominent hail shaft in the orangey light from the low sun angle. From there we went to Kit Carson and then directly east. Soon the buildups were tall and nasty looking, layers of grey-blue to purple with a white lip on the back end of the anvil directly overhead. It was very dark, threateningly so, directly ahead and just behind that anvil edge was a clear, very beautiful blue. 

Soon we started to see hail on the roadside, then with car lights on, there was a string of vehicles on a road covered in nickel or larger hail. Lightning enhanced the feeling of urgency and ‘white-knuckled’ driving (thank you to those careful drivers!), and hail got heavier and more coarse. Corn crops were broken, smashed and showed stripes of hail between the tattered rows. There was way less, if any thunder, compared to the storm on day one, but lots and lots of cloud-to-cloud and C-G lightning and we took videos of the road and the lightning strikes while driving only about 30kmh... an estimated 2/3 of that 90-mile drive was on a hail-covered road with drifts of hail, power outages, and tree damage. Cows in the fields seemed dazed in the whiteness that spread densely under increasing illuminated clouds and dramatic snakes of lightning strikes. The danger of hail and the potential for hidden tornadoes really struck home and we were excited, and quiet in the tension of driving through the back side of the storm core... when we reached Sharon Springs, we stopped for two minutes to feel the cool air and stretch, switch-out the tired drivers (well done, people) and assess the timeline. It hadn't been possible to go south to get out from under that slow-moving cell, and our slow progress at nearly the same speed had kept us under the back side of the storm for that whole distance. 

Alas, dinner was impossible as we had more than a few hours to go before the motel in Garden City. So with lightning continuing to the east behind (north) of us, we discussed the drama and reviewed pictures, posted some, and talked about the models showing that our next day could have a lot of action in the atmosphere. 

It seems that every storm has a uniques character and depending on conditions, only some of which are understood or charted, and one's exact position and attention, that observations are always informative whatever is happening. Each of us had their own pattern of responses to conditions that really were dramatic and mostly not in our previous experience. Fascinating to see how we all had appreciated the drivers' care and sent concern to our accompanying film maker, driving alone into unexpected conditions, connected to one vehicle by walkie-talkie that relayed information in the light show... it was spectacularly beautiful in an eerie dark, threatening way... the glow of lightning illuminating the inner structures of that mesoscale storm of pinky oranges. The storm we'd left earlier, that gave serious rain and wind overnight in Lincoln and headed east, gave a near-record number of wind-damage reports in a wide swath all the way to the eastern coast... people there, sure don't need rain!  Judy Anderson