Hill City KS Storm

April 24th

Started the day out by departing Lincoln late morning, with plans of making a preliminary stop in Holderage to grab a bite to eat and kill a little time. I arrived in Holderage around 2 or so and grabbed a quick bite to eat, thanks to reviewing data on the way, I knew I had to get further South and West so I just continued to Arapahoe NE. There I enjoyed the nice blue skies at a park and monitored data for while. Looking at RUC Mesoanalysis page as well as surface obs it became apparent I would have to get just South of the NE/KS boarder, though I was in no hurry to do so. I eventually slowly meandered towards Norton KS, where I waited for initiation. While in Norton I noted developing CU in two places, off to my West near the KS/CO boarder. I noted per surface obs that there was a Pseudo WF just to my South, that had a few struggling CU, I was more watching this area for development as it was more of a favorable environment. However the CU along the boundary struggled so I moved West to the more elevated convection moving North-East. I stopped just West of Oberlin as there was no need to get to the storms as they were not very threatening. While sitting to their east, I noted the more Southern Convection beginning to move more of a due East, a quick look at surface obs revealed that this convection was beginning to interact with that Pseudo WF. Sure enough the Southern storm began to tap into the Warm Moist inflow and started to move right. The storm quickly transitioned into a healthy supercell and was soon tornado warned.

Storm Just starting to get its act together, Note the newly forming inflow Band streching SE.

Updraft starting to condense wall cloud.

Note the bands leading to the storm, also standing under main inflow band, at this point storm has inflow winds gusting to at least 40mph.

Wall cloud under base of the storm.

Wall cloud, and dust being kicked up. Flying dust was all over, the inflow was causing zero visibility on the dirt roads.

Here are some radar grabs, nice little couplet, I am that car with the arrow going East.

I continued to chase the storm into the Night, the storm looked great on radar, but was wrapped in rain.

The above Picture as well as the next picture were taken at this time, I am the car with the red dot.

Looking back to the WSW just east of Hill City, same time as above radar image,

Here I was moving East to position in Stockton to let it core me, in Stockton I experienced golf ball sized hail and 70mph winds.

After letting the storm core me in Stockton, I raced to get ahead of it again, and just beat it to Osborne, NW of Osborne there was 2" hail. This picture was taken 8 miles East of Osborne about 10 miles before the Storm Produced EF-2 tornado.

Storm just East of Osborne, looked decent both visually and on radar. Stopping to take pictures got me a little behind and in trying to catch back up I opted to try 2 miles of County Roads, that were pure mud, I made it about 3/4 of a mile, 1/2 of which was down hill and not by choice, by the time I got unstuck, I was too far behind to catch up and it was now after Midnight so I began the long drive home.