For a marginal day which we all knew it would be, a nice chase. The
storm took on some supercell appearance. It actually looked more
classic than LP. I think the earlier storms moving through really
moistened up the boundary layer.
A nice attempt at some rain as we are driving south from Valentine, NE to Thedford.
This is when the storm looked the best, around 7:48pm CDT.
A fairly outflow dominant storm now as it was gusting east of Thedford.
It tried to organize again North of Halsey, NE.
Many tornado warnings and some confirmed tornadoes in Tennessee so far today and more to come likely in the southeast. Here’s one radar grab from the SE of Nashville.
Well, here we are 3 years after Katrina and we have another (currently category 4) hurricane headed for the lower Mississippi. Bands and even the eye of the storm can currently be seen from the Key West, Florida radar.
Let’s hope people pay attention to the warnings this time and get outta town. I still wonder when we’ll really ask the question of whether it makes sense to rebuild homes in a bowl that is about 6 feet below sea level right next to the gulf of Mexico. That’s a discussion for some other time.
Either way, stay up to date with Gustav at the NHC.
We’ve had two great days of chasing in Kansas! Thursday we saw several tornadoes, which can be seen in the chase log section of the site or clicking this link. Yesterday, we only saw one tornado as we got caught on the ‘in between’ storms. The storms that went up early produced a wedge tornado that several saw. We saw a nice elephant trunk tornado and then everything went HP (High precipitation) so it was hard to see things and then got dark… On to today!
-John
It looks like tomorrow will be a possibly explosive day in the central plains, with Kansas being under the gun for severe storms. We are just south of Grand Island, NE tonight getting ready for a long day tomorrow. The SPC has a good chunk of Kansas under a moderate risk for severe storms for Thursday. Right now I’m liking an area somewhere from Hill City, down to about Greensburg, KS. Yes, Greensburg is of course the site of the EF-5 tornado last year. You can keep track of us on spotternetwork.org and also on severestreaming.com/livechase
Technical discussion:
The big h5 trof out to our West is starting to eject onto the plains. A Warm front will move northward through the afternoon tomorrow ending up somewhere right around the KS/NE border by early evening. Also, a nice sharp Dryline will be moving east through C KS as well. We’re planning to set up on the nose of the DL as storm motion will be to the north so I’m hoping we can get something to root in the boundary. I think storms will move across the WF too fast to TOR. I’m wondering about the 00Z NAM though as it doesn’t break out any precip on the DL until 6Z, well after dark. Will this be another after-dark monster tornado maker? I’m wondering…. Anyways, I’m also worrying that the h5 winds don’t really veer until around 0z and I think that storms will be going by then… I’m not excited by the hodographs until later in the day, and I worry precip will be going by then. Parameters look otherwise good though. SIGTOR is insane, CAPE is great, LCL’s look good, we just need to winds to work out a bit.
Target:
Hays to La Crosse, KS, possibly needing to move south toward Greensburg.
Greetings and welcome to the first of what may turn out to be several posts that I make on a recurring basis. On this page I hope I can get some knowledge out to those who might be reading this and hopefully we’ll all learn something.
You’ll likely see some cross talk on this page between storm chasing, Skywarn, and also some thoughts on education technology, depending on what my mood is. So, I’ll think up some stuff and check back here soon.
Take Care,
John