2010 Storm Chase 31 Brief - July 15th

Chased today with Travis Speakman and Tony Dawson. It was supposed to be simply a local chase... but you know how things get. Suddenly, we're in southeast Colorado. Anyway, it was interesting for sure as most of the storms had gone into outflow mode only to catch their stalling boundaries. Then, more cells fired along the boundary and they all seemed to come together at a pinch point near Eads. We watched one area of rotation get pretty worked up and saw a wall cloud form. I looked over and saw two tall columns of rapidly spinning dust under the outflow and tried to take pictures of it, but it was a bit too low-light to handle, so I needed my tripod. I snapped this shot before spending way too long trying to get the tripod out of the back of the car and get it set up. I was quite frustrated. Anyway, look at the image full size and look just to the left of the rain drop that the surprise flash caught near the horizon.



Anyway, the area was rapidly rotating and the vortices danced around each other for a while. Travis reported it. (0123 10 SSW EADS KIOWA CO 3835 10285 MULTI VORTEX NON CONDENSATION TORNADO ON THE GROUND FOR 2 MINUTES OVER OPEN LAND. (PUB)) That was our position, but what we were looking at was at about 5S Eads.

I would have liked to have been closer to "document" it fully, so I can't call it a documented tornado, but it probably was one none-the-less.

Precip halo around the west to east moving line of storms before they crashed together, just to our southwest.

The two lines crashed together right over us at this point which made for extremely chaotic conditions directly overhead and to our south. There were areas of extremely rapid rotation, though they never quite tightened up into distinct funnels. There were gustnadoes everywhere at this point but it was hard to tell if any of them were fully involved with what was going on at cloudbase. I was videoing at this point as the wind was continuously blowing dust into our eyes and blowing my camera tripod over.

We left at this point as the precip cores congealed over us and we spent the next 45 minutes in core north of Lamar and then east of Lamar. We eventually came out after driving through 50kt northerly winds and shot lightning a bit before it all wound down. We headed home but stopped on the backside to shoot lightning near a flooded road. The winds were very strong out of the backside and quite warm... I would estimate between 75-80ºF with high Tds. The air was never really cool (though I would expect that from the "cold pool" behind the MCS).

Anvil crawler lightning on the backside of the MCS as it stalled out in SE Colorado.

Dann.