Eastern Colorado: July 29, 2019
With an open schedule on the 29th, I left Oklahoma City before sunrise to make it to northeastern Colorado by early afternoon. As often is the case in eastern Colorado, storms fired a bit earlier than depicted by models, as convective temperatures were breached around 20z. The HRRR was playing catchup with dew-points all day. I figured it was a good sign when lower 60s (even a few brief mid-60s around Burlington, CO) dews were hanging on through midday across eastern Colorado.
The storm I targeted developed near Cope was elevated, initially, and multicellular at first. With time, it better organized and proceeded to drop southeast and then south, riding along a moisture gradient. The storm matured into a well-developed supercell around I-70 and continued to intensify, for a bit, as it moved southward. However, over time, the storm was more and more outflow dominant. It never had a classic surface-based look, probably in part thanks to relatively large temperature/dew-point spreads.
The storm remained visually interesting for a couple of hours, even though it was morphing from a once mature supercell to an increasingly disorganized cluster. With limited moisture to the south and the loss of daytime heating, the storm faded away, shortly before sunset, near Sheridan Lake.
Overall, this chase far exceeded expectations. Colorado is fickle, but I think this was a case of regionally favorable moisture (mid-50s to lower 60s dews over the High Plains) and more than ample deep layer shear, working in tandem with weak large scale forcing to keep convection relatively isolated. I’ve seen plenty of higher CAPE/high shear setups in Colorado bust, simply because convection erupts very early and storm modes get messy before storms have a real opportunity to mature.
I took more photos during this chase than any other chase day this year with well over 100 photos. There many unique photo opportunities and it was a great opportunity to continue to practice with the relatively new camera. I wasn’t worried about trying to position for a tornado, since the odds of seeing one in this type of setup were close to zero. Also, I was fairly certain that this one storm was the only one within range. The Nebraska panhandle storm(s) were far away and the tornado-warned storm over by Pueblo looked outflow-dominant as well and was not worth a risky dart west at the last minute. I generally kept myself a few miles downwind of this storm to be able to catch as much structure as possible in the photos.
Chase opportunities will be very limited over the next few weeks, if there are any at all. As I usually do, I treat each chase as if it might be my last, or at least the last for a while. This was definitely one of my better chases in Colorado, as I usually have fairly lackluster luck in the state. Monday’s long-lived supercell did not disappoint, even if it never came close to producing a tornado. While May and June may be more classic months for storm chasing, July has a knack for featuring a few solid storm chases in the Central Plains as well.
