June 09, 2020   

 

My son Ryan and I took drove out to Overland Park, Kansas to meet up with our friend Brian Stertz for a storm chase.  After a good night's sleep at Brian's place, the target was on the Kansas / Nebraska Border.  We headed out Interstate 70, had lunch at Salina, Kansas, then headed north to Concordia, Kansas.  We finally settled on stopping further north in Chester, Nebraska.

We found an empty parking lot in the city park along the main road and waited for storm initiation.  Wasn't long before another chaser pulled in, then another, and before long, the parking lot was filled with chasers, many of whom were our friends.  Seems we were all thinking along the same line as to where initiation of storms would be.

Was interesting watching the atmosphere bubble as we waited.  There were three things in play today that would dictate storm production.  A cold front to the north, a boundary to the south, and a dry line.  The first storm fired to the north of us.  Most times we like to be patient, but we ended up going after this storm.  It was Severe Thunderstorm Warned, but the hope was it would go Tornado warned.  That never panned out.

Eventually, we bailed south as this storm never could get going, we passed several other storms that had fired as we proceeded back south, but none of them looked promising as the storms were badly outflow dominate.  We worked our way all the way back down to Highway 36 in Kansas.  As we were driving east, we came upon a storm displaying a rainbow as a result of the hail core.

As we continued east, a tornado warning came out on the storm about 20 miles in front of us.  It was going to cross the highway near the town of Axtell, Kansas.

The storm had just crossed the highway as we were got to it.  We were able to follow the storm north and east through all of the paved, rock, and dirt back roads keeping up with the storm and we crossed back over into Nebraska again, but its best show for us only produced a funnel cloud under the consistent rotating wall cloud. 

We finally found Highway 136 (again) and moved toward the Missouri River Bridge at Rockport to intercept several more storms that had formed near the river and now on the Missouri side of the border.  As we were 10 minutes away, we began hearing of a tornado touchdown near the town of Mound City, Missouri.  As we crossed over the river, we decided to play it safe and backtrack to let the storm in front of us pass as the hail core appeared to be quite big.  We stayed on the hail's edge and saw pea size hail fall.

We  crossed the river again after the hail passed and hopped on Interstate 29.  We passed the remaining storms in the line now to our east as we worked our way back to Brian's place.

Saw good storms today, but the anticipated tornado potential never came to be.  Our trip was hampered several times by road construction which included several long waits at one lane bridges that were controlled by LONG stop lights and another waiting for a pilot car leading us through a one lane section of road after waiting for 10+ minutes that put us well behind some of the later storms and potentially leaving us short of getting to the storm with the tornado touchdown in Missouri.  Another interesting fact about today was our path took us to nearly the same spot near Pawnee City, Nebraska as our chase on May 22, 2020.

This trip path included multiple states.  Here is our state border crossings start to finish:  MO, KS, NE, KS, NE, MO, NE, MO, KS, and MO.

33 Hours - 1175 Miles