5/22/2007 Tornado!

Wow, the long drive the other day paid off!!!

After a very long night in the Shamrock Country Inn (truck drivers next door decided to get drunk as hell and keep us up all night), we decided to target the area northeast of the surface low in west-central Kansas. We grabbed breakfast at the Best Western (after all, the Shamrock Country Inn didn’t have a continental bfast) and headed north toward Dodge City. After a Sonic burger and some Internet at Burger King in DDC, we migrated north and west toward developing cumulus north of Dighton, KS. After quite a bit of maneuvering, we finally got ahead of the rotating wall cloud near Quinter on I-70 [thanks to Alan Black for the nowcasting … we had to call Alan for radar updates b/c we blew a fuse and had no radar data on the Threatnet … ugh! Lesson learned!]. Anyway, we followed the intense meso north – wow, what an intense midlevel meso it was! The vault and mid-level rotation was … how can I describe this … delicious!

We dove east toward WaKeeney, and then headed north up US 283. Wow, what a storm! The supercell seemed to quickly go “high-precipitation,” then ... all of a sudden ... the rain quickly dissipated around the meso, revealing a rapidly rotating wall cloud and funnel. The funnel briefly touched down a couple times – once with condensation and then with a dirt swirl with no condensation to the ground. What a treat!

As the tornado dissipated, the precip filled in behind us. Uh oh! We had to travel down 283 … into the core of a new meso churning out ice to the south. Boy, I thought for sure we would “spider web” the windshield on the Camry. We eventually broke free of the ice machine just north of WaKeeney and then followed new mesos that continued to redevelop east along I-70.

We capped the night with a lightning show west of Hays. Tornado warning was issued for the town and everybody went crazy … literally!

Fantastic day!