April 2008
You are currently browsing the articles from In The Vortex written in the month of April 2008.
And today we drove to Kansas for Mexican Food
After driving to Kansas zero convection was seen in the southern half of the state. Instead of busting our butts to head to northern Kansas, which would have put us many more hours away from home, we opted for Mexican food in Pratt Kansas. After a VERY enjoyable meal we headed to Elk City, OK for the night.
Next possible chase looks to be Saturday: stay tuned for forecast.
Written by David on April 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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No time today for an indepth forecast post. The image above gives you the general layout for currently this afternoon. A nice sweeping dryline bulge coming out across NW OK with low pressure back in Kansas.
Moisture streaming up into KS ahead of the dryline and upper energy will be coming out soon across central and northern KS and NE. Expect stoms to fire later east and north of DDC. There could be some further south along the dryline but with aN stout cap in play, we decided to try to get as far north as we can.
Currently in Canadian, TX headed NE and will be turning north once we cross in to OK heading for KS. We got a later start than we wanted today. We aren’t yet throwing out the option of busting east if the dryline fires off here in western OK. If something does pop along that, it should be severe rather fast with all modes of severe possible.
We will have the LIVE ChaseCam up and running here shortly!
Written by David on April 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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Another image of the better tornado we saw yesterday. Ended up seeing two actually. The second one was weird in that it had rapid rotation in the wall cloud above it (we were nearly right up under it) and multiple dust whirls spinning around each other underneath it making it, by definition a multiple vortex tornado, but the tornado never filled with dust nor condensed to be visible from the cloud to the ground. Still though, a nice catch.
It was kind of cool after they aired the Live shot of the tornado on KCBD to get a call telling me we just made television history in Lubbock being the first to shoot a tornado live on the air in the Lubbock market.
Later as we headed back and took a look at a high based storm that had gone over Lamesa and dropped some big hail (which damaged one of the other KCBD Storm Chase vechicles heavily) we came across a massive hail path on the south side of Lamesa.
Stopped to play with it a while and take some pics. Later ran in to some of the crew shooting the next Discovery Channel Storm Chasers TV special in Lamesa. The got their vehicles damaged pretty good as well. Ended up going back south to take some more images (below). Anyone lose a golf ball?
Thanks to everyone that followed along and watched the LIVE ChaseCam yesterday and SPECIAL thanks to those that donated to our chase gas fund!
We are chasing today (Thursday) in Kansas and I will be posted a chase forecast here shortly!
Written by David on April 24th, 2008 with 5 comments.
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As seen on the LIVE Chase CAM: Tornado south of Lamesa, TX
Written by GrahamB on April 23rd, 2008 with 8 comments.
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David and I are currently heading slightly south and west of Brownfield to position ourselves south of the warm front and east of the dryline. With the interaction of the boundary, the increased clearing, and substantial heating, the atmosphere should become strongly unstable increasing the risk for an isolated tornado. Thus being one of the reasons for out departure away from the Mod risk area. That being said, any thing that goes up, should propagate NEward into the Mod risk.
Note: As i write this towers are becoming visible to our southwest
Also, the LIVE ChaseCAM is up and running for your enjoyment.
GrahamB
Written by GrahamB on April 23rd, 2008 with 3 comments.
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