Sunday, June 14, 2009

A Mother Ship


June 11th Storm Chase
Silver Lining Tours

It is quite an eerie sound as tornado sirens sound except for those who are chasing them...then it becomes music to our ears.  Our chase started of near Limon Colorado were we got on a nice supercell with good structure and a solid core, but soon our attention moved elsewhere.  Storms were firing near Pueblo and we needed to get there fast.
The first storm we got on was beautiful liberty bell shape with a nice wall cloud, but remained kinda low key.  Our attention turned to the south where there was another supercell rapidly developing.  Worrying about the outflow choking off our first target we moved south to position our tour between the two storms.  
This was some treat, being right in the middle of two storms that had such amazing structure and both that could produce at any moment.  The southern cell became the more dominant cell and over took the one to the north.  We chased it for over five hours.  It maintained its mother ship appearance for so long.  The core had over 4 inch hail and had a beautiful whales mouth on it.  One time producing a nice white funnel, but would not produce a tornado for the large chaser convergence that overtook the storm.  
Soon to make our way back to Denver we decided to take a small dirt road back to highway 287 which became the worse move of the day.  The photogenic cell quickly closed in on us leaving us no place to go as the exit to 287 was closed.  Our running the core by seconds we went back to see what she left and man was it impressive.   Over golf ball size hail at one time was tennis ball size and a great shear funnel for kicks and grins.  As it rolled into the night near Oklahoma and Texas we made our way back, but not before fighting off the mass swarm of chasers at the local McDonald's.  

Suaave

1 comment:

  1. Those storms were gorgeous! I was watching the live coverage on TWC. The one that got "cut off" actually produced a rain-wrapped tornado. Verne Carlson captured it on video. Crazy day man ... if I would have left work an hour earlier ...

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