6/11/2011 – CO/OK/KS Supercells

After a couple days of crappy chasing (multicell crapvection and blue sky bust with damn good ingredients), it was nice to finally see a day where it was clear some “okay” ingredients would come together to produce supercells in the High Plains. We left Pratt and targeted the area west of Springfield, CO. This was region near a poleward moving front, with Tds in the low to mid 50s along with bulk shear in the 40 knot range. With a pretty good upslope component and heating along the higher terrain, it was no question we’d get initiation today. As we neared Springfield, we gassed up and headed west toward Kim to intercept convection moving off the north side of the Raton Mesa. We sat north of Kim on sr-109 for quite a while watching virga bombs produce some neat microburst formations at the surface, in addition to some lightning induced fires in the rangeland that fills this drought-stricken region. We kept our eyes to the west as a supercell finally got itself together northwest of Kim. We allowed the storm to slowly come to us along sr-109 – a long, patient view. The thing really ramped up and produced intermittent funnels, but we never saw anything we’d consider a tornado – despite what folks who were further away would call in. Yes, there were some dust whirls, but they never seemed to be attached to the above funnels – instead, they appeared to be due to inflow/outflow circulations. We’ll await some photo evidence …

The supercell wrapped precip around the mesocyclone, seeding the inflow … at the same time, storms developed along a boundary surging northward, which contributed to the seeding and cooling effect of the supercell’s inflow. Unfortunately, the cell started a slow decay. We ventured east in an attempt to push through the developing convection along US-160 between Kim and Pritchett. Ran into some hail, but eventually outflanked the storms north of Campo along some dirt roads. It was clear at this time that the Colorado storms were struggling so we set our sights on a nice looking storm (visually and on radar) about an hour east of our location. We eventually caught up with it southwest of Liberal, just at the right time – the storm went from a high based hailer to a surface-based muncher as we approached. We tangled with the hook a few times near Turpin, where we had very intense inflow as well as a wrapping dust swirl/rain curtain to our immediate northwest. We slowly migrated southeast, staying ahead of the storm and navigating left splits that a storm in north Texas was throwing our way. The storm was very impressive and beastly at this time, but failed to provide a view that would allow one to make a confirmation of a tornado within its strong, rain-wrapped circulation. We eventually let the storm roll east at sunset, and headed to Beaver to gas up and take shelter from hail of another storm heading southeast from Liberal. Ended the night in Liberal.

I have quite a few animated gifs of the storms this day, which are available for your perusal here. 

Funnel associated with storm northwest of Kim, CO.

 Wrapping rain curtains/dust south of Turpin, OK.