June 9th

SC KS & NC OK

What was advertised to be “The Chase Day of The Year” don’t believe me? Just do some browsing of some forecasts by not only other chasers, but also SPC forecasters. I was excited about the day, but maybe not quite as much as some, I never like chasing when the area is even slightly influenced by A.M. precip, also I was concerned as the WRF among other negatives, had the next upper level wave timing a little late, which ended up being a big problem. Though as it was, I did have hope that there would be some chase able tornadoes and I chased, leaving early Tuesday, with a initial target of Clearwater KS. By mid afternoon, it was becoming apparent the concerns I had (plus a couple others that came out of nowhere) were combining to significantly lower the tornado potential. As it was, I held out hope that convection would fire and with enough LL turning, just maybe something would produce. I played the scenario about as best as I could hope, and ended up on an explosive updraft just South of Arkansas City, KS (right on the KS/OK border) that storm had a real nice spinning meso, and tried to produce right in front of me, but the skinny updraft was not enough to digest the RFD and the storm quickly began to struggle. From there I saw a storm firing near DDC and realized conditions were becoming “more” (doesn't’t mean much) favorable for development to my NW, so I raced NW towards Pratt. Along the way I encountered some insane and explosive updrafts, yielding some absolutely incredible sky’s, as is always the case with insane atmospheric phenomena, pictures will never do it justice, but they’re the best we got…

Just rolling up on the storm South of Arkansas City...

It was clearly rotating, actually quite strongly, it was just a relativly small storm...

Breif time lapse of circulation, it was spinning pretty good, and a couple times you can make out funnels, i.e. from :40-:48 you can see a small funnel in the upper right part of the meso...

This is what a dieing updraft looks like...

At this point there were updrafts going up everywhere, none of which were any to great...

I started to work my way back North, closer to the boundary, if you look close you can still see a few pieces of hail falling...

New Updraft EXPLODING on the boundary...

The Following are just some of the crazy stuff you can see when you get on the backside of an updraft...