There
was a lot of thought about a chase leading up to this
day. The situation was complicated due to the fact
that our chase partner, Brian Stertz, was tied up with a
medical issue in the hospital. We finally decided to
take the opportunity on this one day trip with just my son
Ryan and I.
The models continued to
focus on the area in the vicinity of Northeast Kansas /
Northwestern Missouri. We headed out early in the
morning with a moveable target of somewhere between
Salina, Kansas and Manhattan, Kansas. As the morning
and afternoon went on, there became growing concern that
this target in Northeastern Kansas was not going to
verify. A secondary target around the Kansas /
Oklahoma border seemed to be showing slightly better
parameters. There was much conversation back and
forth between which target seemed like the best option as
we tried to make some sense of the data in the car.
Even Brian from his hospital bed chimed in with his
opinion to head south to the better parameters. In
the end, we decided against making the trip down to the
Oklahoma border and made the decision to play a target
kinda in the middle of the two. This was based on
the model developing a isolated cell that appeared to be
on the edge of the backed winds and better parameters.
As
the afternoon wore on a couple more hours, we began
hearing of the cells down on the border becoming tornado
warned. Our thought was that we really messed up by
dismissing Brian's suggestion to head south and would end
up missing out on the big tornado producers on the
day. As it turned out, those storms quickly became
non-tornadic like the model had hinted as the tornado
window was very short-lived down there.
The HRRR weather model
continued indicating a couple of cells would initiate
right around the Ottawa, Kansas area and also indicated
those storms would still have some tornado potential later
in the afternoon. So we sat in Ottawa, Kansas for
probably a good hour just waiting and waiting. A
couple of cells did fire to the west of there, but none
seemed to take off. As we watched these storms
approach and then slide by to the north of Ottawa, they
showed little increase in intensity or any increase in
wind velocity. As the storm was slipping by to the
north of town, we heard a storm report that there was 3/4
inch hail falling, so we decided that we should drive up
to the storm and check out the hail behind the core as
this was the direction we needed to go anyway to start our
trek back home. As we worked our way out of
town and then north toward the passing storm, we noticed
that the storm did have a wall cloud on it. We also
noted it had a very slight rotation. Wow! We
weren't expecting to see that.
As we
worked our way closer, the wall cloud began showing some
signs of a little stronger rotation. We started to
see some inflow bands working into the storm.
Then
at its peak, the storm ramped up pulling inflow from near
the ground level and we observed above the tree line
between us and the wall cloud, a plume of dust right under
the updraft/wall cloud. Was it a circulation on the
ground? Was it a tornado?
Even
though there was a news helicopter hovering right next to
the area of interest with a perfect view into that area of
interest, we never saw a report of a circulation on the
ground. Certainly, this dust plume was in the
correct place, but there is no way of knowing without
ground truth from somebody closer if this feature was in
direct relationship to the circulation from the wall
cloud. This persisted for 20-30 seconds before
dissipating.
We
did follow the storm east and watched the quickest demise
of a storm that I've ever witnessed. Within a matter
of 10 minutes, the entire storm seemed to vaporize.
We worked our way back to
the Highway for the ride home, but not before stopping in to
see our chase partner, Brian, in the hospital.
16.5
Hours
* Total Miles - 699
May 19, 2018 
