This day looked very promissing. There was a moderate risk area over large
parts of Oklahoma and Kansas. First we decided to head to northwest Oklahoma
were drylinestorms should fire up towards the eveninghour. We saw a couple of
storms to our northeast, but that weren't the storms we were waiting for. At
about 6 PM a giant updraft formed over the northwestern horizon. We went in
search of this cell and ended up in south central Kansas.
A local radiostation
reported a tornado on the ground 30 miles to our northwest.
The supercell
looked very well organized from a distance, but another cell merged with this one from the
west. Later on we discovered that this cell was backbuilding for hours.
We found the wall cloud pretty soon near the city of Bucklin.
The storm was moving slowly in our direction, which we found quite odd as storms supposed to move NE. We moved when rain started to fall, but just when we were in the car we saw a funnel moving in our direction from the south. I didn't look that strong and it vanished after 20 seconds. I guess it was somekind of gustnado, although it was bright white, assuming condensation. Unfortunately I didn't manage to take any pictures of this event.
Driving south we saw another very low hanging wall cloud. This one produced a
tornado very quickly. It looked like a stove pipe over the orange colored
western horizon. I guess it was 10 miles from us. Pretty soon it went in to its
rope fase and it dissapeared. Wow! Later we found out that this storms produced many tornadoes in the surrounding area. A real tornadofest!
The storm now became outflow dominated and we were blasted by dust and tumble
weed. Later on the cell formed a new wall cloud but this time it failed producing a tornado.
After sunset lightning became visible, but it wasn't very active though.
We photographed CG's for a while and tried to get a CG and a windmill in one frame. Lightning was too remote unfortunately. After one hour we decided to return to Amarillo. |
