This was a chase of opportunity. I was in Wichita to drop off my wife at a New Kids on the Block concert (separate story!) and I had it in my mind that a storm chase was possible. On this day, a slight risk of severe storms existed in northern and central Kansas. After taking my wife to the meet and greet area for the concert, I decided chasing was worth my effort on this day. As I was driving north to Salina, a tornado watch was issued for northeastern Kansas and Salina was in the southwestern corner of the watch!
Encourgaed by the watch, my strategy was to track storms that were ongoing in northcentral Kansas as they travelled eastward into better dew points, lower LCL’s and near a warm front. The storm motion was only about 25 mph so I felt as if I had time to react.
I set up shop in Abilene, Kansas. The only storm warned on was approaching Clay Center. Instead of waiting on the next storm (that would have been the better move in hindsight) I decided to chase the Clay Center storm. It was high-based and outflow dominated but had some fantastic cloud-to-ground lightning. Just as I was thinking about heading back to the southwest, I got a calls from Matt Gingery and Brian Hurst who told me the storm moving into Ottawa County had just gone tornado warned!
I made my way back to KS 18 west and headed for the storm. I noticed a funnel report on the storm I was heading directly into but was unable to see any structure. I eventually headed down Solomon Road toward the city of Solomon just north of I-70 and shot some video. It was after sunset at this point but some backlighting at least made the awesome structure of the outflow and what could have been a wall cloud structure visible.
I went through Solomon and back east toward Abilene. The road curved back to the north on the west side of town which threw me a bit but I figured I’d shoot best structure and worry about which way I was looking later! It was from this position just on the outskirts of Abilene that I shot the wall cloud and what could have been some small funnels trying to pop out of the base. (see the “zoom” video)
I finally ended up in downtown Abilene and the all familar and eerie sound of tornado sirens was blaring as I prepared to head south out of town and back to Wichita for the night. All in all, a sucessful storm chase!
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