Day 10: Kansas!

Good evening SWIFT enthusiasts!

Today was quite the day in Kansas. After an exciting day yesterday, we started off slow this morning but got into chase mode with ease. During the weather brief we determined heading south was the best option especially since the storms would be firing off earlier today.

 

Afternoon

We had a grab and go lunch at Qdoba’s in Colby, KS. We fueled up on gas and headed south to meet an initiating storm. We hung out with that storm most of the afternoon. Ben got us out of some destroyed dirt roads that someone decided to drive a semi-truck through. He was awarded Zebra Cakes, again, for his heroism in the line of duty. We followed it by heading east and then heading north. Eventually we met up with some cows. With the supercell in the distance the cows came near us but kept their distance. They were oddly huddled together. Once some other storm chaser’s drone came close, the cows jostled each other to get away from the thing. To be clear, Langston and Julia kept a respectful distance from the cows while operating the drone. Five or ten minutes after the drones were gone, the cows came back -but closer this time! I think Julia appreciated our new friends. We then headed south to Scott City for a pitstop at Love’s Travel Shop.

 

Evening

It was at the Love’s where we came to a crossroads. There were two areas of interest: the storm we chased to the north and a group of storms to the south. After looking over the HRRR model and radar, the weather team decided to go south due to its unimpeded inflow, direction, and anticipated longevity.  We made quick work of heading down to the southern storm. 

At our first stop we were greeted by many locals who were passing bye, and they seemed really nice. The pigs in the adjacent building were squealing out of excitement. We could hear them the whole half hour we were at that spot.

We jutted to a few other locations as we wanted to stay with the storm, but not too close where we could possibly get drenched or worse. Tornadoes were reported on the other side of the storm that we were looking upon but much of it was shrouded by rain. Eventually the storm wasn’t having it and became a mess on the radar. It seemed to have a lot of precipitation and a lot of outflow. The rotation of the wall cloud seemed quite large to produce a tornado.

As for tomorrow we have a very special guest joining us. It’ll be a surprise! Stay tuned for more updates.