June 19, 2018 Tornado

Keenesburg, Colorado

Our last chase day of the tour proved to be the grand finale as Mother Nature really put on a show for us. We began at Fort Morgan, where the morning brought us a warm, humid airmass with that hazy look with meaty cumulus clouds that makes you feel it will be a good day of chasing.  Thinking storms would develop earlier today, we hurried south and got to Limon where we ate lunch at an assortment of fast food restaurants (mostly Taco Bell).

Once again, the first storms did not fire over the Palmer Divide, and when we finished lunch, we already had Supercells from the Colorado/Wyoming border near Cheyenne, to Greeley, Longmont, and southwest of Denver.  The cell near Longmont looked the best.

Radar shot of the storms.

We drove back to Byers then north on county roads to get a view of the bases of the Denver and Longmont storms. It was immediately clear that the northern storm had the most interesting base. The base was lowered, and it had a bowl-shaped look.  That appearance was occasionally altered by RFDs punching through it. Nevertheless, we debated which storm to chase until we heard Bill Reid on the radio stating that they were headed to the northern storm.  Our decision was made.

Base of the Longmont storm. Note the bowl-shaped lowering on its left (west) side.

There might be a funnel in here. Time to get north!

We continued north and encountered some road construction that made us worry that we were going to get stuck.  Gladly, we did not, and we continued north as the storm produced another RFD surge, and soon Bill Reid came over the radio to report a tornado (the were a few miles closer than we were).  I looked ahead and could see what he was talking about. The tornado became more well defined as a narrow condensation funnel lowered to the visible horizon.  We found a place to pull over and view it.  We were behind a bit of a hill, so we could not see the dust swirling at the ground, but we still had a nice view.

Tornado on our storm!

Zoomed into the tornado.

Tornado becomes a bit narrower, but it is persistent.

The rope-out process begins.

Once this tornado roped out, we observed the storm for a few more minutes but then noticed it was being cut off by new storms developing to our east.  At this point, it became clear that we needed to jump back on the southern cell we had been considering earlier.

The storm had some nice structure right after the tornado dissipated. Other areas of rotation had me thinking we would get a second tornado, but that did not happen.

Soon, this second storm was tornado-warned.  We got back to Deer Trail and drove southeast for a bit on I-70 and then exited for about 20 minutes of good storm viewing.  The lighting on the wall cloud of the storm was fantastic, but our inflow was becoming a bit cooler. Temperature-dewpoint spreads in the air immediately to our south were also larger, and cloud bases were not as low as they had been with our first storm.

Wall cloud on our second storm.

The wall cloud moves over I-70.

We made a couple more stops at I-70 exits to observe the storm.  Our inflow became cooler with time, and winds were more northeasterly rather than easterly like they had been at our first I-70 exit.  Soon, we were hit by a gust of some pretty cold air, and the outflow was definitely upon us. We made one more stand at Arriba then hopped back on I-70 and dropped south at Seibert.

Storm over NextEra's Limon II wind farm at Genoa, Colorado.

iPhone photo of the storm over NextEra's Limon II wind farm at Genoa, Colorado.

A wider view of the supercell approaching Limon II wind farm.

The storm approaches the Limon III wind farm near Arriba, Colorado.

iPhone photo over the Limon III wind farm.

There were not a lot of road options, so had to go all the way to Kit Carson before coming back northwest toward our line of storms.  By then, all the trailing storms had become non-severe. We stopped on the way back to Limon and did some photography of the sun setting under thunderstorms.  We were also treated to a nice lightning show.

A nice, lightning-illuminated sunset to end our chase.

From there, we continued to Limon, where we ate a steak dinner at Oscar's Bar & Grille. Rooms were pretty booked in Limon, so we drove to Castle Rock to spend the night.

Our route for the day.

Electric chasing: Superchargers in Brush and Limon would make it an easy chase, but it would require some delay in the chasing as our second pass through Limon was during the chase.

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