Day 7. It's a Twister!

It happened. I finally saw a tornado.

We left Liberal, Kansas at about 10:30 am and headed west in a hurry. Dave and Roger were predicting that the only real possibility of good storms would be in eastern Colorado. Once we arrived in Limon, and got out of the car to 50 degree temps, we decided to head south toward the boundary. We gave ourselves an hour. If the temperature didn't break 70 degrees within an hour, we were turning around and heading to Elke's mother's house near Denver.

Things heated up. Quickly. By the time we reached Pueblo, there was a cell brewing that looked as though it would become a small supercell. Then another cell popped up. And it looked as though it would become a supercell. Much to everyone's surprise (not mine, I didn't know what to expect), they both became small supercells! Each capable of producing a tornado!

We started heading southeast to try to get on the southeast side of the storm and came upon this, a horizontal funnel cloud trying to reach the ground. It was stunning, with the light coming from behind, creating a silver look to the funnel.

We got back in the car and tried to find a good place to photograph and view the structure of the huge, now merged, supercells. This is the cell with the wall cloud hanging down in the middle, and the core of the storm behind it. Shortly after I took this image, a small, white, wispy tornado formed in this area. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures.

The structure of this storm was spectacular. All the experienced chasers were saying that this was a classic high plains supercell.

It started heading toward us so we moved on so as not to get walloped by the core, which was producing two inch hail and driving rains. We continued heading southeast to get out of the way.
The mothership:

We stopped at a truck graveyard near Lamar, Colorado to check out a possible tornado. It looked to be a large, cone shaped tornado on the ground just north of us. It was backlit by the sun and had a pink, orange hue.


We got back on the road and headed into Lamar, and hoped that the mesocyclone would stay south of us, which it did.

This was a spectacular day.