Today was one of the first significant storm days this June that I was available to spot/chase. The chase started with three supercells in the vicinity, the middle one around Ft. Lupton looked the best so that was my target. The southern cell was over work and it didn’t look that great although it ended up having incredible structure over Limon and Eastern Colorado. Soon after I started Northeast out of Aurora the cell went tornado warned. About 45 minutes later a tornado formed out of the SW side of the storm–a long elephant trunk style tube. I watched it as I approached stopping to take a picture every now and then.
A quick stop as I couldn’t resist all the power lines photo bombing the tornado! Keenesburg Tornado, June 19, 2018.Although the hill obstructs the view of the tip of the elephant trunk tornado on the ground, the structure of the storm was incredible! Look at that wall cloud!I finally was in position to see the full tornado, just as the rope-out phase was starting. Just so happens that this is my favorite part of the tornadic cycle!Note the hail on the back side of the mesocyclone.Just a small tiny string of the tornado as it completely ropes outFollowing this beast east, I was aiming for structure shots and got several nice opportunities!This supercell was behind a line of storms that formed east and south of this location (near Shamrock, Colorado), so it slowly died.
After the supercell was mostly dead, I had a choice to attack the line of storms to my south. One cell had consistently put out tornado warnings in Elbert County and it had a brilliant velocity couplet, but that would require a bit of a corepunch which is risky with such high lapse rates (i.e. big hail). Looking NW, I saw a nice supercell with great structure so I decided to check that one out. I knew that it would likely die as it hit the cold outflow of the line of storms to the east, but given I was aiming for structure shots this seemed like the best option!
Supercell with amazing structure taken NW of Woodrow (the storm was NW of Ft Morgan at this time). It went tornado warned right about the time of this picture, with the velocity couplet on the right side of this storm.This is just north of Brush Colorado, looking west. The once amazing supercell was being torn apart showing just the mesocyclone structure.This was the final storm that I chased with a long shelf cloud extending southwest of the storm.
