Our target storm coming out of southeast Kansas.
Chase number three of this week. The best area looked to be well northeast of us in southwest Missouri, and I'm very happy our nowcaster (Lou Wicker) agreed with this, as this turned out to be the best area to go. We initially targeted storms coming out of southeastern Kansas near Chanute. However, when we were making a fuel stop in Joplin, MO (for what seemed like an eternity), a healthy storm developed immediately to our west, which we targeted. The storm split right away, and the left mover shriveled up and died pretty quickly, which was nice to see. The right-moving storm then slowly churned eastward, producing hail up to baseball size (which I did not know about until the following day). We made a nice three-doppler deployment on the storm (SR-1, DOW2, and DOW3), but the updraft base moved right down the baseline among all the trucks, somewhat ruining this deployment. The storm sported an inflow tail and relatively nice updraft base. However, numerous other storms developed in our vicinity (north, west, and south) and mucked up the situation for us. It appeared our storm would soon be overtaken by more linear development off to our south. Thus, we were slow to break from our deployment and move eastward with the storm. It continued to rotate slowly and developed an occluded RFD that showed itself as a nice swirl in the updraft base as it went directly overhead. I looked back at the rotating storm's updraft that was now being surrounded by lots of other slate gray cloudiness as we let it go. An hour later, as we were heading home, we heard of large tornado reports a couple counties east of our deployment location, making me wonder if our storm was the one to produce the tornado. Lou indicated that our storm had died, but this still ended up being a somewhat frustrating day.
Our target storm coming out of southeast Kansas.
Base of our supercell.
Updraft of our storm as it moved east of us.