So the three-day stretch from June 16-18 was indeed one I wish to forget - but I was in good company. Another rather painful busts was June 16th, where we chased weak storms near Sidney, Nebraska while a stationary, classic supercell was parked just southeast of Wichita while we were eating dinner in Sidney. Other busts on this trip included the only true “blue sky bust” of the trip which was in Iowa (of course) on June 18th. Of course, there were the low points - including the most low-point chase day in my 12 years of chasing storms - the “Bust for the Ages” on June 17th. Daytime lightning photography was also a success on two occassions in northeastern Colorado - June 14th north of Limon and June 21st near Iliff in the northeast corner of Colorado. This was probably the most amazing mammatus I have ever seen.

Another memorable moment of the trip was the mammatus over Pratt, KS on June 15th. Not to mention, this storm yielded me my only tornado images of this vacation - a nice, tall, dusty tornado south of Pritchett, Colorado. This storm landed me some of my best images of the year, including a “shot of the year” candidate - a rare image of mirror inflow dust jets feeding into a massive supercell thunderstorm. The highlight storm of the trip was the Baca County, CO – Morton County, KS Supercell of June 13th. It wasn’t on the ground for long, but Tulsa confirmed it the next day.It was another successful chase trip, but not without some significant disappointments. We followed the storm further east towards Afton, and managed to witness a brief tornado in between the flashes of lightning. I was weary as a large scuddy lowering had just come through town and the air felt cold and the flags were indicating steady outflow. We filled up in Vinita and Tulsa issued another tornado warning. The lack of roads up there really hurt our chances of staying with the storm. We got hail as we headed down towards Vinita. What was a nice bowl lowering because a gusty shelf cloud in the matter of a few minutes. It was dark, so I tried my best to stay ahead, but it was hard to leave some of the terrain I found up there northeast of Nowata for the crappier terrain further east.Įventually Tulsa issued a tornado warning on it, and it seemed like a tornado was imminent but never seemed to happen. We headed north of Nowata then east on SH10 where the storm seemed to take on it’s best supercell shape with a large mesocyclone and even a wall cloud underneath. It seemed to be struggling with the cap, but the storms up closer to the triple point or at least dryline/warm front intersection in Osage county seemed to be doing much better, so we took 169 north out of Tulsa towards Nowata. We knew the main show would be out of reach up by Joplin or west, but we were hoping for something to fire a little further south along the dryline, and just about dusk it did.Īs I neared Tulsa, a little troll storm had fired over the city.

I was still at work, and bailed out and headed home, leaving Norman by 6pm. I had no real plans to chase, but that changed at about 5:30 when the SPC issued a MD and Tornado Watch for NE Oklahoma.

Scuddy shelf cloud