Date: May 27, 2012
Time: Late Afternoon
Place: Stockton, Osborne, Hays, KS
Camera: T3i, Lumix
Warnings: SVR
Rating: S3

Quite a fun storm chase day in north-central Kansas. Today probably holds the record for highest count of distinct storm cells I've seen in one afternoon. The SPC issued a medium risk from Hays, KS north into Nebraska. There wasn't a particularly high tornado risk (5%), as storm bases were forcast to be a little too elevated. However I was particularly excited about seeing lots of interesting storm structure.

We ate a late breakfast and did some sightseeing in the early afternoon. I'm really dissappointed in myself for not getting a world's-largest-twine-ball picture in Cawker City. We ended up hanging out for a while in Stockton, right on the dryline. It was really neat to see half the sky filled with cumulus and half totally clear. It took a little longer than I had anticipated, but storms finally started firing south of us near Hays. Sitting on a quiet little hill, we had an excellent vantage as the first wave of cells advanced and strengthened.

Unfortunately for our tornado-viewing chances, storms immediately began crowding each other and jostling for air. Cells would build only to rapidly collapse as neighbor storms choked off their inflow. All this was totally fascinating though. But it did make storm chasing a little tricky. At one point, a particularly nice storm started to really take on a classic supercell look, and even appeared to be trying to root its updraft a little lower to the ground. As we watched, however, other storms swarmed in quickly from the south and caused me to make a bad split-second navigation decision that put us out of position. Still, it was a great learning experience.

As evening approached, storms to our north started taking on a more linear, squall-line structure. But there was still one last isolated cell to our south that provided awesome sunset views. As we pulled back into Hays for the evening and ate a late supper at Applebees, other storm chasers began flocking in as well. We saw the Weather Channel and Discovery Channel crews, as well as a bunch of other well-known chasers. Overhearing their stories as they ate in the booths around us was really fun. I could probably get used to this.