With a couple storm chase opportunities slated for the weekend, we left DeKalb Friday afternoon and overnighted in Topeka. Saturday was progged as a moderate risk
3 days out, but thanks to overnight and morning convection across the risk region, the overall threat for severe was
reduced. On Saturday, we targeted the area around Garden City, but had to keep pushing west due to cool easterlies flowing out of the
decaying MCS across Kansas. We held up in Syracuse for convection to mature to our south. We eyed a
storm in Colorado, but were too patient for the stuff to our
south. The storm in Colorado, naturally, went on to produce a number of photogenic tornadoes while our convection slowly weakened as it moved up the CO/KS border. Disappointed, we raced north and then east toward Oakley. Not expecting much, we were suddenly intrigued by the
convective towers going up along the
warm front stretching along I-70. The bases to all these showers had distinct rotation, revealing the tremendous shear in the low-level environment. We then turned our attention to a storm that was maturing south of the warm front near Gove City. We thought that if this storm could continue to mature and interact with the front, we'd maybe see something. We shifted east from Oakley over to Grinnell, where we hoped to dive south to intercept. Alas, the road was a muddy mess so we had to be patient and let the storm slide up toward us. This was extremely frustrating as tornado reports started to trickle in, but we couldn't see a damn thing since we were smack in the middle of the forward flank downdraft (FFD). Eventually the rain free base and bowl revealed itself behind the cloak of FFD rain. Sure enough, within a couple minutes an elephant trunk drill bit formed and slowly meandered north-northwest for what seemed like 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile, the rain had picked back up and twilight was upon us, which made for difficult photography. Alas, we snapped photos best we could and then skedaddled west along the interstate to get a closer look and split the two different mesos evident on radar velocity. As we stopped along the interstate west of Grinnell, we had a tornado in our west quadrant associated with the primary/occluding meso, a funnel and likely translucent tornado to our south along a shear zone, and a new bowl with funnel to our east associated with the rapidly maturing meso. This was quite the site, but will have to remain in only our memories as light was fading and the scene was chaotic. We saw two more subsequent tornadoes to our northwest associated with the "old" meso and then a number of touchdowns with the meso that moved to our distant northeast. We decided not to follow it north due to darkness and the hotel reservation waiting a few hours away in Salina, KS.
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| Yes, it rains in the FFD |
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| Takes on a cigar shape. |
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| Lightning illuminated FFD. |
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| Rope stage. |
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| One of a number of tornadoes that occurred to our northeast as new meso trucked north into the dark Kansas night ... |
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| New tornado with occluded meso northwest of Grinnell. |
A few time lapse clips from dashcam.
The next day was a bust (for us), with Ma' Nature laughing at us as we drove through Des Moines heading home while a long-track, multivortex danced about 70-90 miles to our northwest.
