Scott Hammel watches an low precip supercell slowly move across the CO/KS border.

The day started out with a 4hr work shift and a lot of tea. As soon as I got off work for the day, I went to start my car to meet up with Scott Hammel and Kendall LaRoche in a secret location. I turned the key over and over again and no sign of the engine firing up so I frantically called Scott to see where he was at that point. Luckily he hadn’t hit the road and was able to come pick me up from my work. We headed over to pick up Kendall and reminded about the tornado outbreak of April 14th. After grabbing Kendall from the secret location we shot out east on I70 towards Limon, Colo. Sitting shotgun I pulled up some maps to see which target had the greatest potential for storm in the day time. We noticed SE CO/SW KS looked like a good target with 50Td surging north from the TX panhandle.

A single lightning bolt strikes an open field near Springfield, Colo.

Once we arrived at Springfield, CO we gassed up and re-positioned to the SW of Springfield, Colo. to watch developing storms off to our west. The first line of cells went up and produced some heavy rain and lots of cloud to ground lightning.

Low Precipitation supercell northwest of Springfield, Colo.

We continued to watch the developing cells and we were in perfect position to see the tail end storm develop nice structure and begin to rotate. This would be the cell we would follow into KS and eventually watch it die out around sunset.

Scott Hammel watches a plum of dust get kicked up by rear flank downdraft winds from a supercell near Springfield, Colo.

All in all it was a great relaxing chase, not every chase will produce long track tornadoes or massive hail but these chases produce some of the best structured storms I have seen. Thanks goes to Scott for doing all the driving and Kendall (nominee for the title of storm reeper) for his insane amount of energy seeing as I had been up since 4am and wasn’t so awake.

MC.