Myself and Paul Robinson spent the night in Oklahoma City after a rather uneventful chase in the Texas Panhandle the day before. Our target today was to intercept the cold core storms in Central Kansas associated with a rapidly deepening surface low. The shortwave was giving us southerly 500 mb flow. So the target had to be right on the triple point where the surface winds were easterly. The moist tongue pointed to the Chase/Marion County areas. We departed KOKC around 9am. By 10:30am, Cu along the eastern side of the dry punch stretched from Arkansas City, KS NNW to just north of Wichita were starting to erode away at the cap.



As we were approaching the ICT area, our nowcaster Adam Atkins informed us of a 50 dbz cell that had developed southeast of Wichita. Visually, the cell looked soft and not very robust, but it was in an area that had good moisture with mid to upper 50's Td's, much better than the upper 40's to low 50's Td's near the Salina area. At this point, we had a little nowcaster miscommunication. We thought the more robust cell that came to tornado warned cell later was northeast of Wichita. We decided to go northeast on I-35 out of ICT. However, once we made the turn NE and were on the turnpike, I realized that we made a wrong move. The northern cell was north-northeast of ICT and we now were moving away from that storm as the storm's motion was north-northwest. Realizing that this move put the northern storm almost out of play, we decided to continue northeast towards Emporia and get out in front of the cells in southeast Kansas and wait for them to move up towards us.

Once arriving in Emporia, a new cell had developed just south of there. It moved over the city and developed a wall cloud as it moved over the eastern part of Emporia. We watched a RFD punch wrap around the wall cloud and it organized a bit, but showed not signs of low level rotation. Below are the images shot in Emporia.



We continued to zigzag north and east intercepting the cells further south and east. We were looking for a storm that showed some signs of organization. We continued this until we ended up the the southwest suburbs of the Kansas City metro. At this point, we noticed what looked to be a inflow tail that flowed into a storm just SW of the KC area. We called our nowcastor and said it had a small V-Notch shape and a weak meso associated with it. We went north into Olathe, KS, however, our highway turned into a city street, killing our chances of getting closer to check out the storm.

We called off the chase at this point and hopped on I-70 to begin our trek home to Denver. We made it to Topeka, KS and decided to stop there for the night. When we woke up the next morning, I found my car looking like this!!



Here is the front page article in the Topeka newspaper the next morning on Sunday! I can't believe it's only February and I already have two chases in.



Once again, myself and Paul did some hand analysis of the streamlines (black lines), dewpoints (green lines) and Isobars (pink lines) roughly during the time of the tornado report near Lucas, KS. During this time, Russel had a northerly wind and the nose of the moisture tounge was being pulled around right to that point. It is also interesting to note the trough or mesolow that developed in central Arkansas. This area is also where the tornadoes occured in SE Arkansas. The mesolow pinches off the moisture from the main surface low in northcentral Kansas and serves as a focal point for the storms in Arkansas.