Our chase started in Wichita on Thursday morning. After debating between chasing the northern target and heading south into OK, we set up just north of Wichita to see if things started to fire up north first. After waiting about an hour I got impatient and headed south. We set up right under the dryline near Wellington, KS. After about a half an hour of waiting there and having the dryline start to overtake us, we headed east towards Winfield, KS.
At this point storms had started to fire in Northern Oklahoma and were beginning to fire to our south along the border. We took the first storm in the line initially and watched from a point just east of Arkansas City. After it was obvious this storm was dissipating, we headed SE again to get in line for the next storm currently crossing the border.
We set up a couple miles east of Maple City, KS and waited as the next cell passed just to our west. After a little rain and some small hail but not much else, we were about ready to leave. After seeing a little bit of movement on the back end of the storm we decided to stick around a little longer. This is when we noticed a little rotation and lowering as depicted in the video below.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22636334 w=510h=285]
SE Kansas Chase – 4.14.2011 from Twister Tracker on Vimeo.
I don’t think it ever touched the ground but can’t say for sure due to our vantage point. Overall it was a pretty disorganized storm and I doubt it would have touched ground for more than a few seconds if it did.
After this storm we went for the next storm in the line which was currently moving into KS from OK. At this point we got into the terrible road network in SE KS and basically called it a day. We got hit by some pretty strong RFD winds near Peru, KS then headed up through Independence and back towards Wichita.
We did learn a couple things about the Twister Tracker application in the field:
- The auto-refresh is a pain when you don’t have great cell signals because it sometimes took the page a minute to load and would then immediately refresh. We’ll be turning this off for mobile devises.
- We need to make sure the site is fully optimized for mobile to ensure faster load times when your signal isn’t that strong.
One interesting thing to note is on our way back to Boulder on Sunday, we witnessed 3 separate microbursts along I-70 near Goodland, KS. Two of them looked fairly small (one of which we drove through) but saw one massive one in the rear-view mirror near Goodland which triggered the NWS to issue a severe thunderstorm warning for the area. Unfortunately we didn’t get any pictures of these.
Total Miles: 1,362
Tornadoes: 0
Funnels: 1