Thursday, May 6, 2010

Post date: May 6, 2010 3:53:59 PM

10:30 am CDT

Sorry for not updating last night. We had a long day and got into the hotel pretty late... knowing full well that we'd have to get an earlier-than-usual start again this morning (to position ourselves for possible activity in Kansas later today).

Anyway, to recap, the cells that we were tracking yesterday were total crap. They weren't all that great to start with, but even if they had been worth chasing, they were moving so fast (40-50 knots) that they would have been almost impossible to keep up with. After a while, the group consensus was that we would abort the chase and put some miles behind us in preparation for better conditions today.

For some pictures from yesterday, go HERE.

So now we're heading west out of Bridgeton, MO. We'll need to put some miles behind us and get well into Kansas before things start firing up later today. Tornado probabilities aren't really all that high, but we are looking at some potentially significant hail. Here's what the SPC is showing for tornadic activity probabilities...

Here's the travel map for yesterday:

11:45 am CDT

The SPC just released the 1630z Convective Outlook update, and here's what it shows:

That's a LOT more territory that we may have to cover, but the East-West road network in Kansas should help a lot.

4:10 pm CDT

We're tweaking our location a bit to head a little farther southwestward in Kansas, but at the moment it looks like we're gonna be in the right spot if things start to pop up. In addition, the SPC has upgraded the eastern portion of the area to a 5% chance of tornadoes. It's gonna be a "hurry up and wait" kind of thing...

12:15 am CDT (Okay, okay... so this is technically Friday, but it's the final report from the Thursday chase!)

Late-firing storms today really screwed with our chase plans, but after we grabbed some dinner in Emporia (Kansas) we spotted a great cell off to our northwest. Soon thereafter, while we approached from the south, it went tornado-warned, and we enjoyed a really nice backlit wall cloud near Council Grove. Baseball-size hail was reported associated with it. Not a bad way to end the day!