Day 31: Spectacular Supercell Intercept; On-Camera Launch

Spectacular visually that is… More on this shortly

First though, Storms developed quite early in central Kansas today.  Around 9:30 CDT,  a heavy downpour with plenty of lightning and small hail passed through Salina, KS where we were staying.  This complex of storms created a complicated scenario for our target later in the day.  The storms helped create a cool, stable layer of air that was racing southward towards southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma where a warm front was located.   Our morning mission was to head out towards Wichita, KS to get south of the boundary of this cooler air.  On our way out of the hotel, The Weather Channel crew including Mike Bettes stopped us and asked if they could follow us and film our balloon launch.  We agreed making sure that they were aware we have a coordinated time we need to get the balloon off and to make sure they would not get in our way.  We arrived at our destination shortly after 12 pm CDT.  We got our radiosonde and balloon ready while Mike Bettes and crew filmed.  This footage was being shown live on weather.com.  As we let the balloon fly, I noticed we lost our tracking satellites and had to scrap the launch.  We got another radiosonde and balloon ready and this time they went live on TV.  The filmed us getting the balloon set-up and letting it fly.  Mike Bettes then came over to me as I was navigating and keeping an eye on our communications while the launch continued.  So I got on live TV today..  I was told that the video would be online sometime so when I find it I will post it here!

Now on to the storm…  As I said earlier, the initial convection appeared to have altered the thinking of a SE Kansas target.   The more favorable environment was over a bad road network with a lot of hills which is terrible for chasing.  Instead we headed west in hopes of convective initiation from an approaching disturbance.  It turns out this was the correct target as storms developed just south of Dodge City, KS. On the way there we saw hundreds of chasers not with V2 on the road to our desitnation.  Initially, the storms were not severe or superceluar but the strongest storm split into two with the right moving cell quickly organizing into a visually spectactular Supercell.  This was our target storm for the day.  It produced golf ball to baseball sized hail.  There is also an unconfirmed report of a short lived tornado about 5 miles west of Greensburg.  Thankfully the storm weakened before it got to Greensburg..   The Doppler on Wheels (DOW) radars are going to be reviewing their data to see if there was indeed a tornado.   Either way, the V2 armada documented a supercells lifecycle from beginning to end. As far as the mobile sounding units, my sounding truck obtained a vertical profile of the atmosphere behind the rear flank downdraft (RFD). We also obtained data in this region during the storms demise. The other sounding units obtained data in the forward flanks and inflow regions.    The storm only lasted for about an hour and half,  but like the title says was visually spectactular!!  Enjoy some photos!!

Approaching the storm..

Spectacular structure!!

Possible lowering/wall cloud visible..

And behind the storm where we launched from…

Supercell moving away and slowly weakening..

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