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July 13, 2011 Parker Lightning Show

We were in a Severe Thunderstorm watch this afternoon but as I was chasing all the storms were dead before they got 30 miles east of the foothills, but there was heavy rain, slow moving storms and I knew after dark it would be a great lightning show. I triangulated a great place between a couple of storms and then drove to find a good overlook to the northern storm which was pumping out some great lightning. I had to finally leave once the bolts were a little too close for comfort, but I had a great 30-45 minute session without rain!

July 6, 2011 Front Range Supercell

Although storms this day didn’t amount to much severe activity, there was some nice looking clouds and I was able to get home early too! Nice after work chase! Pictures were taken near Bennett.

June 17, 2011 Kit Carson County Supercell

Today was a fun chase. Started off on a cell from Parker to Agate, then a brief stay with a cell over Limon, but decided on tail-end Charlie and hit up the storm near Rush. It became TVS warned as I was intercepting and it looked great! Followed this cell all the way to Cheyenne Wells where it started to tap into the moister air and had to fly south to beat the building core. Great lightning that evening around Hugo too!

June 1, 2011 NW Kansas

Today was a good risk of severe storms over NW Kansas and South Central Nebraska. Everything looked great so I targeted Wray knowing I’d likely be getting into Kansas or Nebraska during the evening. Got out there about 3:00 and nothing was firing; no clouds so I immediately knew there was a cap in place. It was very hazy so I knew there was good instability, but it looked like I needed to go another 60-100 miles east to get into the convection.

Ended up on a couple of storms that had nice wall cloud lowerings but with the haze it was difficult to see even though I was very close. Ended up on some very slick mud roads and had to redirect the chase into southern Nebraska. Was a long drive home!

June 11, 2010 Crazy Supercell in Adams County

Another big day for weather. The estimated Instability (CAPE values of around 2000) were not as large as the day before, but there WERE going to be big storms. The storm that formed around 3:00pm over Golden that put down 3″ of hail on the ground (and 1″ hailballs) I believe was the straw that broke the camel’s back and prompted a tornado watch for all of eastern Colorado. I was getting off work and looking west the storm was just going to go north of us. So I decided to check it out, since I was there and all….

As I got out of town I heard the storm was Tornado warned, but Radar (not visual), so I figured I’d stay on this. I got north of Bennett and parked for a while.

I drove north a bit and the storm was looking pretty mean so I jumped out and started to take some picture and film. I heard that there were funnels reported near Barr Lake (just north of my location) as well; so everything was looking ripe.

For all of these shots, some looked like tornado(s) to me, but I couldn’t detect if they were rotating. There were no confirmed tornadoes in the SPC reports; so either I’m the only one that saw these (doubt that) or they were not tornadoes…I can’t report them as tornadoes unless I’m sure, which in all cases I wasn’t…

I suspect the ominous looking formations I was seeing were something like this, and with a hill in the way they appeared to be on ground but perhaps weren’t. Regardless, really great structure and clouds!

While south of Prospect Valley, I was watching the storm with a volunteer firefighter and we saw this. Not sure what to make of it; it looked very ominous but I could not detect rotation. Cool structure for sure!

This was embedded in the rain, but it was weird…and suspect!

Then I saw this…which is very ominous! Not sure if it was rotating though, so can’t call it a tornado…but it sure did look that way!

This was neat. There was an outflow that was hitting the ground and then getting sucked back up into the storm. This was visible for over 15 minutes, and was very visibly moving.

The structure of this storm was worth the price of admission for sure!

Just south of the storm was some surreal clouds.

What a day. Ended up not feeling too well (headache, sure it was allergies) and so I decided to head home. I ended up merging with a storm in Strasburg that put down some 2″ hail. Yikes! The overall structure of this storm was great. An awesome chase!

May 26, 2010. Aurora to the boonies north of Fort Morgan.

First, here is a link to some photos, several are below… Click here to view the slideshow.

Didn’t know if I was going to chase this day as I had a meeting until 3pm likely I’d be behind all day. After walking back from another building on campus through the sprinkling rain, I saw a couple of nice towers starting to form; one just east of us and one to the north. Got back to my desk and took a look at some of the maps and imagery. Did a little work and then decided to take a break and check out the storm from the 9th floor; I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.

While up there I saw some impressive lowerings on the east side of the updraft base; but they were pretty far away–I’d estimate west of DIA. Then I saw a small scud-like cloud form, on the ground, out of the center of the rain shaft dominating the whole west side of the storm.

It was pretty far away; I’d guess 10 or miles? But the scud cloud started to rapidly rise from the ground. I then noticed a bunch of disturbances on the ground; a few were spinning. It reminded me of the water around a waterspout and I even asked the docs that stopped to look as well if there was a lake out there. I never saw a funnel or condensation tube but I’m going to chalk this one a very small rain-wrapped (for a while at least) tornado. It reminded me of the tornado I saw last year near Hoxie Kansas as both just appeared out of the rain and then dissapeared; although the Hoxie one definitely had more traditional structure. I put up some video (same zoom; from my cell phone) on facebook.

Some pictures of the chase:

It turns out Adam Boggs was directly next to this lowering and has some amazing footage of it. In his footage it didn’t appear to be rotating much either; we’ll call it a Scudnado. It was impressive structure though! Ended up hooking up with Adam on some random county road and we chased the rest of the day convoy style. This was a great chase and the storm had magnificent structure at times!

April 22, 2010 Douglas & Arapahoe County

What an interesting early start to the chase season. I knew that the weather was going to get good out on the plains, but due to Hunter being sick didn’t think I was going to go out. After talking with Hunter and getting him to the doctor with meds, we needed to stay low profile so we decided for Hunter to watch movies all day…what is the difference between watching them in bed or in the back seat? So we decided to chase.

We picked up the storm in Castle Rock and while heading east on Hwy 86 the cell was tornado warned. To get in front of it we raced north on Hwy 83 (Parker Road) and finally started getting hit by hail near Parker. The traffic was really slow so I took a detour off of Hilltop and headed east.

Looking east as we got out in front of the storm we saw some serious inflow with lots of swirling going on.  I got a call from Scott Bennett, a chaser I met last year during the June 15th storm in Elbert County, who happened to be watching under this inflow at the end of Singing Hills, so we met up and chased the storm through the deep hail.  Scott ended up heading back to work at Strausburg.

Near Dear Trail I heard of the cell having a confirmed tornado, but I only saw some swirls in the clouds at that time.  We needed to get in front of the storm moving basically N-NE and so we took 71 north out of Last Chance to Woodrow and then west on CR 29.  Here we saw the storm just after it swallowed another cell and went linear.

Here are a couple other views of the storm west of Woodrow before calling it a day.  What a great EARLY start to the Colorado chase season!  We ended up getting 20″+ of snow the next morning, then another 12″+ the next night, and about 3″ the following night!  Spring is finally here!

Hunter had a great time and did a lot of the computer work for me with the radar!  Nice to have the help!

And with most early spring strong low pressure systems, we have a surprise the next day!