I drove out to meet my chase partner, Brian Stertz in the evening after chasing the storms in Illinois.  Had a restful night's sleep and after getting Brian's wife off to work and dealing with her car issue, we headed out toward our yet-to-be decided target.  Would it be Southwest Kansas or an Oklahoma target down near Highway 40?  After some discussion and input from several other people, we decided on the southwest Kansas target.

We grabbed take out from the Pizza Inn as we drove through Pratt, Kansas and continued on toward our target.  Finally decided on Hugoton, Kansas as our holding spot.  Met up with Jeff Piotrowski as we waited for initiation.

Things were looking good as the SPC update outlined the area in a Moderate Risk. 

Everyone was hammering the idea of how multiple tornadic supercells would fire.  Now the question was, will there be any tornadic storms before sunset? 

Storms were late and slow to develop, but by late afternoon into early evening, we watched cells begin to fire in the distance to the northwest of Hugoton. 

Other storms fired further north and much further south, but we held tight.  The storms grew slowly and by dark, they still had not grown into supercells. 


Disappointing for sure.  Now we were stuck chasing storms at night.  Eventually, storms erupted in the Oklahoma Panhandle and far southwest Kansas at dark. 


It rapidly grew into a line of storms.  Within the line, several circulations were seen prompting several tornado warnings.  We worked our way east and south, eventually into the Oklahoma Panhandle staying ahead of the line of storms and taking a look under each base. 

Lightning was frequent giving us a view of the bases to these storms, but no tornadoes were ever seen. 


For a brief time the heavy rain in the line over took us, but we broke free to the east and shortly after a final tornado warning expired, called it a night and found a room for the night in Alva, Oklahoma.

The system was out of phase with strong shear and too much cold air plowing into western Kansas in addition to a strong cap in place.