We had a fun chase day today. We left Woodward and headed west towards a number of storms already picked up on radar. Our first visual was not a very good impression- no organization, too many clusters and no decent towers. But we were hopeful. South of Buffalo we spotted our storm - decent towers, and good knuckles on the cumulus nimbus. Other cloud clusters had too much wispy-ness (is that a word?) which made me think of a too strong upper level wind cap.
True enough our gut feel paid off- our storm developed strongly and we had a precip column to the north of us, and a precip column to the south. I had the distinct impression that the two storms would merge given the right combination of circumstances.
We had pretty strong southerly winds, rain, and hail was experienced. We did not observe rotation, or any tornado's. I had the strong impression that supercell development might develop after dark. (This is what a lot of the forecasters seemed to think too.)

We chased our storm northwards. We had a pretty hairy drive on a dirt road covered with water - I could feel my car start to fish tail. The storm moved off briskly, and soon we were out of it. We could tell that our chase was ending- light was fading, and the storm, gathering in strength and power was moving off in a direction we did not want to go.

We stopped to photograph the sun's rays lighting up some mammatus clouds. What a wonderful good bye. And then we turned towards Dodge City.
I am pooped. Last night Kevin and I had practically no sleep. We only arrived in Hays KS at about 3:30am. Tonight I want to sleep and sleep.

I will review my photos and post them later. I will also post a more coherent account of exactly where we went and what we saw. I can see that the above descriptions are annoyingly vague. But I am too tired to do anything about that now.

From Dodge City (a place I always swore never to return) signing off....