Frustrating and tiring way to end a chase. We left Pratt around 4 after an OFB hit the town from the convection to the east. Towers going up in Kiowa County. Took some nice back roads and watched two towers for a while. Very few road options and when one finally got its act together we were a little late getting in front of it near Greensburg. We were going to head east on 54 but the prospects of monster hail told me to go back south before going east. Reports of windshield losses confirmed that choice. Unfortunately, it cost a lot of time in that part of Kansas. We eventually caught the storm as it was going into Pratt. Must have missed Rich Thompson's tornado by two miles through the rain. We drove through the RFD as we headed east on 54. We were at the place where the other tornado reports came from and cannot verify anything. Just nothing appeared. It did look like there *may* have been some lowering just to our north. We worked to get in front of it before Turon but it was clearly throwing out cold air and we gave up on it because we needed gas in Kingman and then started heading home.
We have had some good successes this week but were incredibly unlucky. When we had great storms it would produce a good tornado (Bison gustnado yesterday was far from the storms updraft, BTW) We showed up a few minutes late after trying hard for 90 minutes. Oy! I guess we could call wrapping rain curtains a tornado, but the RFD does that a lot...so I will say that we didn't see a tornado.
Todays storms blew up too fast all over the place. For the amount of mid-level lapse rates, convection didnt seem to explode much. Even this storm had problems staying independent as new updrafts kept feeding it from the south rather than become one continuous updraft.
Oh well...one more trip in 18 days.
Paul and Matt
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