Paul Robinson and myself had been eyeing this day for more than a week before it occured. The forecast was surprisingly good at the medium and long range timeframe and very consistent at that. With that, we left Friday morning out of Denver, CO heading towards Liberal Kansas. We chose the northern target as opposed of the southern target of the Childress, TX because the greatest voricity advection was forecasted to occur over SW Kansas.

After arriving in SW Kansas, our nowcastors Josh Wurman and Adam Atkins were both telling us to drop south and go after the cells that developed in NW Texas. The moist tongue had reached the southern cells and appeared that was the play for the day. However, after some post-chase analysis of the day showed the moisture tongue with upper 50's Td's nosing towards Liberal. Had that moisture arrived in the SW Kansas area a little earlier, the tornado warned cell near the Dodge City area later that night might have been the storm of the day. But who really knows?!?! Here is the hand analysis of the 2243 UTC surface obs. The green lines are the moisture contours at every two degrees Faharenheit and the black lines are the stream lines.



Anyways, we dove south and intercepted the storm that produced the tornado near McLean, TX about thirty minutes late. Doh!!! We intercepted the cell near Mobettie, TX. We noticed that it had a funnel halfway to the ground and a grabbed a couple of quick picures. The funnel quickly dissapated after this.



We followed the storms into Oklahoma where they encountered the more stable air underneath the low level clouds in western Oklahoma. They had no real supercell characterics at this point and very little lightning. So we dropped down to I-40 in Sayre, Oklahoma and headed to Oklahoma city to get a room for the night and prepare for a early departure for some cold core chasing in central Kansas on Saturday.