Today was highly eventful! We started off with a tour of the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, OK where we learned about their founding, their mission, and the challenges they continue to face every day. With large gaps in the initial conditions and limitations to our current understanding and technology, forecasting weather can be an extremely difficult job. Not to mention the human aspect, where people want warnings days in advance and get extremely frustrated when warnings are underwhelming or wrong. According to their Operations Director, Bill Bunting, thick skin is needed in the meteorology field, and it’s pronounced “KILLometer” not “kilOMeter.”
Afterwards, we grabbed some lunch from Canes and carried on like wayward sons to Kansas. We were hoping to witness some supercell development in south-central Kansas, near Wichita, but nothing came of it. With some great views and great tunes, we decided to move north on our two-lane country road toward Salina to follow some development along the Kansas-Nebraska border. Organized thunderstorms began to crop up just north of Salina and move east-southeast. Thus began our first chase!
Things were looking promising, the SPC had considered our area of interest to have an enhanced risk for severe thunderstorms and a 5% chance for a tornadic event (this is a really high probability by the way). The storm was there, the conditions looked favorable, now we just had to see the outcome.
Unfortunately, the storm did not remain discrete and gradually formed a large Mesoscale Convective System. This is a line of storms that is not ideal for tornado development. Needless to say, we were able to witness an amazing natural phenomenon. The sky was illuminated with endless flashes of bright lighting and the wind force of the downdraft cold pool literally almost blew us away. Despite no tornado formation, it was still an incredible sight to see!
Storm photo credits go to Sam ‘Uncle’ Ford-Dirks.
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