Day 33: Drive, Drive, Drive and Then a Storm!
June 11 was an early departure day for the Armada. The coordinators were having some major difficulty pin pointing targets today. Their initial feeling was staying in western Kansas or going west to eastern Colorado would not produce so we drove south. Our first waypoint was Sublette, Kansas. There, the field coordinators had a face to face meeting at a gas station to determine where we travel next. Colorado or the panhandle of Texas? They decided on Texas as they felt that would be our best chance for a supercell that could produce a tornado. Our next waypoint was Pampa, Texas, but before we even got there they changed our target to Shamrock, Texas. It was nearly a 4 hour drive to Shamrock. WAIT, do not go that far south.. stay in Canadian, Texas which was north of Shamrock. We waited there for about a half hour before we got some depressing information… Our next destination is Boise City, OK. Boise City is located in the panhandle of Oklahoma by the way so we had to travel back north. But that is not all the traveling back north.. our next destination was Springfield, CO.
Finally we find out a supercell has developed off the high terrain of the Rockies near Pueblo, CO so we drove further north of Springfield to Lamar, CO and then west to La Junta, CO. Thankfully, we had a storm to target that National Weather Service radar indicated had strong rotation. A tornado warning was issued on this storm. My sounding trucks mission is stay launch balloons behind the supercell or in the region after the passage of the rear flank downdraft (RFD). Since we were coming from the direction the storm would be passing through, we had to go southwest to let the storm pass first. I managed to get a picture of what may have appeared to be a wall cloud. The tail of it was pointing towards the precipitation on the right.
A few minutes later as we were continuing to drive south, we noticed these formations. Probably just some vigrously rotating scud, but could this have been a funnel, or at least the storm trying to form a funnel? It did not last long though..
After some waiting and driving closer to where the storm passed through I was able to stop capture some impressive images of the storm.
The updraft shown here was definately rotating..
The rear flank downdraft finally passed where we were located so we went ahead and launched a balloon to collect data. Once the balloon was launched, we continued to follow the storm from behind. We entered La Junta,CO to hear the tornado sirens going off. Tornado warnings continued for the supercell. Once our first launch was completed, we found another site to launch from in La Junta,CO to obtain more data from behind the storm. The supercell was interacting with another supercell coming in from the north and they eventually merged into one storm with the northern cell becoming the dominate rotating updraft. The hail core was deep and there were several reports of very large hail anywhere from golf balls to even a few baseballs. We continued to follow the storm from behind and were able to get one more launch off before sunset. Our last location the cold air from the storm was impressive. Looking into the grass, we saw some hailstones that still did not melt. We do not know how long they were there, but I found a quarter-sized stone.
The sun was also setting so the backside of the storm was lit up very nicely!
The armada obtained very interesting data today on a pair of supercells that traversed through eastern Colorado. We were able to collect data on 2 supercells that were tornado warned the whole time. The sounding units had 4 coordinated launches during operations. My sounding truck was only able to launch 3 times though as we had to delay one of our launches in order to let the RFD pass through. The drive to our hotel was quite interesting also. as there was quite a bit of tree debris on the roads from the hail. We even passed through a town where the ground still was partially covered from hail. It looked like it had snowed!
After a long day of driving, we got a storm and obtained really interesting data. What I also think is important to note is even in such a close timeframe, most computer model forecasts did not handle the situation very well which made selecting a target extremely difficult. It goes to show you how diffuclt it is to predict where thunderstorms will develop let alone supercells.
