For yesterday’s chase, Denver was our target… along with every single other chaser within a day’s drive. We headed south out of Kimball, NE fairly early to make it in time for storm initiation. On the way, we saw some nice low-level rotation in the form of wind farms.
We arrived at Denver International Airport and waited around a while for the storm to come down off the mountains into chaseable territory. It looked fantastic when it finally arrived where we had set up. Unfortunately, it soon started wrapping curtains of rain around the mesocyclone, obscuring any view of a potential tornado.
We kept repositioning further and further east, following the storm. It produced a lot of convincing lowerings (such as the one pictured below) and a couple funnels that members of our group thought they saw. Unfortunately, none of them produced anything.
Right before we got off the storm, we got to see a wall cloud with incredible rotation very, VERY close to our position. Inflow winds were approaching 40 mph, and the whole storm was rapidly spinning.
By this point, chaser convergence was getting bad. The line of cars pictured below wasn’t all that problematic for single cars trying to merge, but for our three vans it was quickly becoming a dangerous situation. Headlights can be seen streaming out of the precipitation of the storm as chasers flee the rain and hail. The nature of the road network focused the vast majority of chaser activity onto this road, and we ultimately aborted as the storm became outflow-dominant and chaser traffic worsened.
We dropped south immediately to try to beat thunderstorm development occuring in a line between our storm and the storms to the south. We drove through some heavy rain and passed very near the wall cloud pictured below, but made it through to sunlight on the other side without encountering any hail.
After that, we beat feet to overnight in Lamar, CO to set up for the next chase day.
It looks like today we’ll be either in northeast Colorado again, or somewhere in eastern New Mexico. We have yet to have our strategy meeting this morning, so it will be interesting to see what the other forecasters in our group think.
Onward!
Giving Chase 