So my chase partners (Ryan and Jim) and myself started making plans to leave Friday evening and overnight in Des Moines, IA to put ourselves in better position. I haven't had the best luck on high risk days and don't really like them given they are are a jinx in the chaser community, lots of chasers and usually lots of storms.
We woke up Saturday morning jacked and nerves high knowing the potential of this day, did our analysis and headed west on I-80 and entered Nebraska during the mid morning hours. This was a first time for all of us chasing on a day with 45% tornado probs. We decided to head south out of York, NE and make our way into KS.
Our initial area we liked was Concordia/Salina and wish we stuck to that. By noon the dryline over western KS was already setting off elevated storms (this would go on to screw up the northern target in Nebraska and limit instability) and the SPC issued a PDS (Particularly Dangerous Situation) tornado watch with these storms forecasted to become surface based later in the day and pose a risk of strong, long-track tornadoes.
We got antsy and went to have a look see at the first tornado warned storm of the day west of Belleville, KS. It turns out this storm didn't look that great and we made the bad mistake of taking an east option onto a gravel road east of the notch...gravel quickly turned to mud on the other side of a hill and we had a close call going down said hill but thankfully were okay and now had to get back up the hill which was mostly mud. It took us about 4 attempts to get back up and get south. If that road took anymore water we would have been mostly done for the day.
At this point new development off the dryline was occurring in southwest KS and this was the start of the show. We headed south out of Beloit, KS and made our way to Great Bend to gas up and had to make a decision between two supercells heading northeast at us.
We chose the southern sueprcell that would head for St. John, KS and had reports of producing tornadoes. We intercepted it west of town and it at the time looked HP and outflowish. It was either stay with this one or drop south to another supercell coming up. We headed south and waited for a supercell coming up to the Pratt/Cunningham area.
This storm looked and felt better (strong inflow) but wasn't heading into the updraft, more offset to the right. We saw several funnel clouds off the the southwest miles away. This storm was also crawling and started to develop a nice inflow tail into the area of interest...a weak, scuddy wall cloud formed but thats about as interesting as it got.
We ended up heading north for awhile keeping with it but it never got going any further and we decided to blast north to another supercell which was producing tornadoes left and write. We were waking up a lot of ground and figured we would catch it near Salina, KS.
radar image at 6:30pm (at this time we are near Sterling, KS)
We continued northward then east to I-135 and were glad to see the speed limit jump to 75mph as we booked it north to Salina and east on I-70. Right before we got to 70 we could several several funnel clouds to the east and knew this thing wasn't done. We continued on I-70 east with the meso just north and spinning nicely and we were quickly greeted to our first tornado, albeit brief.
And only a few minutes later we had another tornado quickly come down just north of I-70. This was perfect and by far my most rewarding tornado to date.
We then exited the highway and headed north as the tornado continued to get larger in size.
gorgeous rope tornado looking north
Solomon, KS tornado video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3SmiR7HxWY
Manchester, KS rope tornado
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYli4sDDMk
Overall it was a great chase day and very rewarding given we were on many storms driving long distances and they just weren't producing for us.
And my first Kansas tornadoes!!!
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