A significant severe weather event, including several tornadoes, affected a large part of the central plains on June 19th. A larger area of the central/southern plains and midwest was hit with severe storms and tornadoes on the 20th.
The events were seen several days in advance as a strong storm system; deep surface low pressure and high instability were all forecast to be in place over the two day period. For storm chasers on vacation this was a must-chase situation.
Saturday, June 18 -
My chase partner, Doug Speheger, and I left Okarche just after 6 P.M. planning on using the evening as a travel/positioning day. Our plan was to reach Wakeeney, Kansas with the potential of seeing a couple of storms and some lightning on the way. This worked pretty well and we watched some storms at a distance that were along the Kansas/Oklahoma border. We ended up seeing a little bit of lightning near Dodge City and Jetmore, Kansas. The lightning could have been better but this was mainly a travel day and anything at all was a bonus. We got to the hotel a little after 12:30 A.M. Gallery of a few selected images from the evening.
Sunday, June 19 -
We left the hotel and headed toward Goodland with a couple of targets in mind. We were confident that storms would form in northeast Colorado and move toward southwest Nebraska but also fairly confident that storms would form along the warm front somewhere near the Kansas/Nebraska border. The trouble was, while it was clear where storms would form in Colorado, it was virtually a guess where storms might form on a 350 mile section of the warm front. We tried to position to keep both areas in play and by mid-afternoon were hanging around the Colorado/Nebraska border around Haigler, Nebraska and Wray, Colorado.
There were several times when we were quite tempted to make a run toward storms that organized early in the afternoon near the Colorado/Wyoming border. Other storms forming near Denver also had us just about to jump, but various reasons kept us hanging in our spot around Wray monitoring building cumulus clouds near the extreme northwest corner of Kansas.
Finally, enough pulsing led to storm development just north of the warm front not too far to our east. Radar showed a steady upswing and we started the move eastward with target storms east of Haigler.
