Yesterday, we started out the day in Fort Morgan, CO. They had placed a Slight Risk and a 5% Tornado Threat Ring over the area, and it looked like we were in a good place for storms later in the afternoon.
Storms looked like they would fire earlier than they did on Day #3 and would line out quickly. I was gambling on a cell or two forming ahead of the line, so we went east to Yuma, CO. The Stormcruzzer folks dove south to Limon, which turned out to be a good decision.
At Yuma, we were in the warm, humid air, with some sunshine and southwesterly breezes. We dropped south for a few minutes to look around, but the storms to the south couldn’t seem to develop. Instead, a storm developed quickly to our northwest, so we raced north to catch up to it.
Between Yuma and Haxtun, there was a severe-warned, and then tornado-warned storm. We could see the back end of the storm, but were still to its south. When we arrived in Haxton, suddenly the winds changed 180 degrees and the clouds overhead were low and boiling. It didn’t make sense.
As it turns out, we were under the shelf cloud as it formed. The storm was becoming outflow dominated and the shelf cloud formed directly overhead.
We hedged north and then northeast on I-76, outrunning the storm and then stopping to take a few pictures of the shelf cloud. By then, the tornado warnings and severe warnings had been dropped.
We dropped down to Holyoke, but the few storms left were either out of play or a clustered, non-severe mess. We opted to call an early night at the Burge Hotel, where we have stayed in the past.
We went for a walk in the early evening and saw a flier for a play, “Southern Fried Funeral” put on by the Phillips County Players, a local theater group. It was a lot of fun, and I was glad we went to it.
In some ways, yesterday was a bust, as we saw no tornadoes and barely any storm structure. If we had stayed with the StormCruzzer folks, we would have seen one confirmed tornado, and perhaps two others, but we would not have had the shelf cloud develop over us, which I thought was pretty cool.
Our route for the day:
Thank you for reading my post.
The forecasts from the National Weather Service are from The NWS Homepage. The upper air soundings and mesoscale analysis plots are from the Storm Prediction Center website. The satellite data, model data, and forecasted soundings are from College of DuPage – SATRAD
High Plains Chasing 