May 30, 2005 Storm Chase

May 30, 2005 Storm Chase | Southeast CO Supercell
All photos © Copyright 2005 Matt Ziebell

This was my first solo chase this season and it didn't disappoint. Upslope flow and modest dewpoints (low to mid 50s...good for CO) underneath a 30-40kt 500mb flow were in place today; although the big caveat was a stubborn stratus field throughout much of the morning and early afternoon. I encountered the worst of this while passing through Pritchett early in the afternoon with 1/8 mi visibility, vertical visibilities of maybe 50' all combined with strong SE winds gusting to at least 25kts. My goal was to get to the clearing line east of Trinidad and await any development along the terrain. The picture here is showing the stratus beginning to break out ~15mi west of Pritchett. I was feeling much better by this time after the dreary conditions a short while back!

The boundary layer recovered nicely after the stratus earlier on and provided some TCu development.

This was the first Cb that I'd see today that would end up becoming a supercell in no time at all. This is the view of it from Kim, CO looking to the NW. Periods of frequent CGs were visible in its narrow FFD at this time. I followed HWY 109 north to get a bit closer and monitor the trends. Time here is 1529 MDT.

After having moved further north, the base already had some interesting development underway. A short while later the structure has improved markedly. I pulled over at the Fiddle Bow Ranch entrance and shot a long timelapse of this now readily apparent supercell.

A broad wet RFD is now in place as a persistent wall cloud continues to cycle through various stages of development and redevelopment. The road options are very dismal in most of Las Animas Cty, so I decided to drive north closer to the inflow notch for better viewing and more importantly a dirt road to the east to maintain this chase.

Left Image: Close to the inflow notch looking WNW. The motion of the fractus was very erratic at times, but no low-level rotation was apparent. Irregardless of that, the beaver's tail was just amazing to watch feed into this monster!

Right Image: I moved a short distance south to let the wall cloud pass to my north.

Before I headed east, I waited to see if an occluded circulation was trailing behind the core updraft. Sure enough, an elephant trunk-shaped lowering was barely visible a few miles to my north along the HWY. It could have passed as a funnel, however it had very little persistence to it and I couldn't confirm rotation.

I took a dirt road east (along with most every other chaser!) and eventually saw this broad lowered updraft with rotating scud tags! A tornado warning was issued shortly before I took this shot looking NNE.

Several funnel clouds cycled in and out under this meso. I snapped this shot of one of them while finding a spot to pull over.

New storms were blossoming SW of this supercell and eventually they corrupted this rotating updraft. I stopped to better observe the lowering shown here and managed to video some impressive rotation, but it later fell off completely.

I departed south late in the evening just before the reported tornado near Pritchett from another supercell upstream. I stopped occasionally to film some impressive CGs south of Springfield at sunset, but needed to get a head start on tomorrow's potential setup in the southern TX Panhandle.

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