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May 22 - North Central Kansas - HP Bull

Finally, some moisture! Finally some shear. A chance for a tornado? Well, we can hope.

Matt targetted Smith Center for the day, so we drove down there and sat in the library watching data. The first storm of the day blew up just to our SW. It was also the best of the day, so we went a little ways south of town to watch it.

Initially, there wasn't much to watch, so we amused ourselves visiting with a local resident:

Here is Kathy and her new friend:

Linda explains cyclogenesis to the attentive audience:

Beth says "howdy" as Linda explains a fine point of storm morphology:

And now, back to the main point of the chase...

As we sat northeast, we observed significant rotation in the cloud base with rising scud:

Then we saw the rain wrap around the circulation just like someone smoothly pulling curtains.

Now we had an HP on our hands:

We stairstepped to stay NE of this storm as it turned into a beast and drowned Smith Center. A sherrif-nado was called in on it (but chasers in the vicinity did not see the tornado, and given the cell structure the location was unlikely).

Once it got a bit dark, and the other storms turned to mush, we headed south. The next show was expected in NW Oklahoma or the panhandles. We spent the night in Ellsworth, KS.