May 10th, 2010: Storm Chase Trip to Kansas

Persons involved: Dan, Crystal, and myself

Total mileage: 1, 673.86
States covered: Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.

Monday’s severe weather set-up was so far from home, but with it being a High Risk day per SPC forecasters and with the forecast models showing some rather interesting ingredients coming together for a severe weather/tornado outbreak in Southern Kansas/Northcentral Oklahoma on Monday, May 10th, 2010, we just couldn’t resist making the 12 hour drive from were Dan lives (Crivitz, Wisconsin) and where I live (Duluth, Minnesota), Dan and Crystal drove from Crivitz, Wisconsin to Duluth, Minnesota Sunday Night as I had to work until 1 AM Sunday Night, they arrived in the Twin Ports around Midnight, so they had a little time to kill before I was done with work, by around 1:45 AM I met up with them and off we went, a little later than I had hoped for, but in the end it didn’t matter.

We left Duluth around 2:30 AM Sunday Night and were able to get through the Twin Cities before Monday Morning’s rush hour, we entered the Twin Cities at around 4:08 AM Monday, continued south on I35, reaching the Minnesota-Iowa border around 6 AM Monday, continued south on I35, reaching the Missouri border at around 9:15 AM Monday. We were making very good time! The weather from Minneapolis through Central Iowa consisted of low clouds, gusty east winds, and cool temperatures.

29 miles Northeast of Kansas City through K.C. proper we ran into very heavy rain along with some occasional flashes of lightning. The visibility was very poor due to the rain! We arrived in Kansas at around 11:20 AM Monday, reached Emporia Kansas at 12:40 PM Monday. We reached our initial target City of Wichita, Kansas around 2 PM Monday and found out that scattered supercells were already developing to our west-southwest while a PDS Tornado Watch was also issued for portions of Kansas and Oklahoma including the area/s we were in.

On a side note: Of all the Cities we passed, Wichita KS had to be the worst! No offense to anyone who lives there, but yea moving on..

Looked at some radar data in Wichita on Dan’s phone for a little while trying to figure out what our next move would be…Figured we didn’t have much time to sit so we had to make a decision on what to do since the storms on Monday were fast movers, some tracking as fast as 50-80 mph toward the NE!

Our final decision was made and that was to drop a bit more to the south to try to intercept the tornadic supercell that was tracking NE across far Northern Oklahoma, this was the cell that produced the tornadoes in Wakita Oklahoma. We left Wichita southbound on I35 until we reached the exit to US 166, this all took about another hour, but in the end it was a good move. Once we reached US 166, we headed east a little bit into the Southwest part of Cowley County Kansas. A supercell continued to spit out tornadoes in South Haven and Geuda Springs across Southern Sumner County which was just off to the west of our location. There were reports that this was a wedge tornado at times in Southeast Sumner County.

This tornadic supercell passed right over our location which was a little west of Arkansas City Kansas on US 166 in Southwest Cowley County. I’ve never seen so much wind and rain in a severe thunderstorm in my life, I also saw a tornado touch down as it passed across US 166, I also may have seen the wedge tornado embedded within the heavy rain curtain, but it’s difficult to say for sure since the heavy rain was making for poor visibility.

Here’s the post storm write-up per NWS Wichita, Kansas:

Tornado was rated an EF-1 and was 300 yards wide. It tracked 4.3 miles.

I saw some homes damaged due to the tornado in and near Arkansas City Kansas, also saw 3-4 semi trucks flipped over just a few hundred feet on the same highway we were on (US 166), a few metal signs were twisted, one found it’s way underneath an overpass!

Here’s a few other pics from Southern Kansas (Monday Evening)