Meade, KS to NW OK
August 12, 2002
Forecast target was Dodge City, KS. Chase parter was
Gene Rhoden and his Scottish girlfriend Karen.
I had looked at data a good part of the morning into the early afternoon, but for some
reason, I was pessimistic about having a second day of supercells in Kansas (the day before
had some pretty good ones in northwestern and west-central Kansas) and was just sitting on
the fence. However, SPC upgraded their outlook to "moderate" at 20z, and that was enough
to make me call Gene, and after about five minutes of conversation, I was convinced to go.
We first saw the storm just north of Woodward, OK. It wasn't there very long before we saw
it. The first view was of the anvil behind a deck of altocumulus in the foreground. Our
route to the storm took us to one of our favorite spots: Sitka, KS. We stopped on the very
road Gene had stopped to video the Sitka tornado
three years earlier (and which Shaun Kelly and I had also gone by). From our first
view of the base of the storm, we could see that it was sending lots of outflow southward:
Meade storm as seen from Sitka
Anvil of the Meade storm at sunset
Nevertheless, a tornado warning was soon issued for the storm, so we casually drove farther
west to a point between Ashland and Meade to look more closely at the mesocylone.
Mesocylone of the Meade storm
Sunset under the Meade storm
Lightning under the Meade storm
A second tornado warning was issued as it got darker. We raced underneath the
nicely banded updraft, but when we arrived, we were greeted by plenty of outflow,
and a lot of CGs to the west. For the rest of the evening, we repeatedly set up
to get some stills of these CGs. It was a pretty successful lightning shoot.
This item appears on Channel 9's web page as a tornado. It's in outlow: just suspicious scud.
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