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:


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Meade storm as seen from Sitka


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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.


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Mesocylone of the Meade storm


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Sunset under the Meade storm


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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.


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This item appears on Channel 9's web page as a tornado. It's in outlow: just suspicious scud.


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