loadedgunchasing.com Blog

It looks like tomorrow might be a chase day. I will work on my forecasting and get something posted tonight or tomorrow morning.

I think we have finally settled on a final location for the blog. It has a much better layout and many more features. I already made my first post there and please check it out. I will continue writing on the new blog and probably just do away with this one after a couple weeks. When I changed blogs last time I got yahoo to automatically redirect hits to my old address to my new blog, but I don’t know if they will do it in this case since I’m directing my blog away from their site. I’ll give it a try though.

Here is the address to the new blog http://mikeygribble.blogspot.com/

Well I can see that not too many people are reading this anyway since storm season is over. I was getting up to a thousand hits on a good chase day and now on an average day I get more like twenty or thirty. Hurricane season is getting started though and we are past due for a big US landfalling hurricane. When it happens I promise I’ll be there streaming live video.

The blog isn’t really over, we are just moving it to a much better site. This will be our third move in the last year but it should also be our final one. This blog setup is lame. It just came with web hoster so I used. We have already started work on the new blog and I’ll post the address for it soon. I will also try to get yahoo to automatically forward hits to this page on to my new one.

The desk is put together so now I am just waiting on the guys to come install my computer. Once they do I got a hell of a lot of work to do, but there won’t be any more not being able to uplaod video clips or not being able to put video on youtube. That shit stops today. I finally get off my bogged down beat up old laptop and on to a bad ass home pc where I can burn blueray and HD dvds. It’s goint to be great. I am most looking forward to getting my blog and website in shape. Right now it won’t cooperate with my laptop, but this should fix the problem.

It looks like there might be a decent shot at a few supercells with tornado potential close to home today. I woke up to pounding rain and it’s been raining all morning. I’ve got a meeting with some chase partners over here at 10:30 to discuss future chasing stuff so I need to get back to that, but basically it looks like this arc of convection will clear out through the day allowing the sun to come back out. If we can get good insolation and a couple storms to fire near the border southwest of Wichita (or some place in that vicinity) they would definitely have a good environment to work with. If the sun starts coming out here I’m going to start loading up my chase gear. The high res. WRF model has a few supercells breaking out just southwest of Wichita along the border Wichita, at a pretty decent time too, which would be ideal. If that happens it could be a really good chase day. That’s a lot of it’s, but it is right next to home so I can sit here and enjoy the rain while I work until then

Sorry I haven’t been on here lately. Normally I’m busy with my regular job, but now I’m actually busy with my storm chasing business. I have a deal where Wilson Electronics sponsors me and I’m doing some work on that. Then I have a couple other deals going that I can’t really talk about. And finally I have the storm chasing business, which is sucking up the majority of my time. I have a meeting with three other guys tomorrow morning to discuss our chase tours for next year. It is a very serious business and one that I’m sure I will be working hard on nonstop until next spring.

My new computer was supposed to get installed today, which would have helped me out a lot, but the desk didn’t get assembled so now it will be Monday.
There are just so many things you don’t think of when you are trying to start a business like this and I am one of those kinds of people who wants everthing planned and nice and neat. It’s exhasuting. I am going to post a forecast today though. later

I am late so I am keeping this brief. I still like the southern portion of the threat area. Using primarily the NAM and current conditions I am going to cheat downstream of where I expect storms to fire. It is fun watching towers go up, but I’d rather play it safe and leave myself more time to manuver north and south if convection unfolds in an unexpected manner.
I think the sweet spot this afternoon is the southern half of the moderate where backing surface and 850mb winds (don’t see that very often) will combine with strong CAPE and decent deep layer shear for a very respectable tornado threat.
Like I said, I prefer the southern half of the target. I did little forecasting btw lol. This would mean towns like Wichita, McPherson, Kingman aand Great Bend would be under the gun. My favorite area is the Pratt to Hutchinson to Wichita area.

I will update through the day on here. I am leaving to pack and head out of town to some place in my threat area. Still not sure.

After seeing the 00Z NAM I still like my initial target of Winfield.
I think the combination of CAPE, deep layer shear and the backing flow in the 950mb-850mb flow with be favorable for a few tornadic supercells. Convective evolution is always an issue when dealing with a frontal boundary, but there are so pretty impressive paramaters from Winfied into north central Oklahoma. I think I’ll be getting off work early for a chase tomorrow.

I’ll update the forecast in the morning

Well I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few tornadoes come out of tomorrow’s setup given the high instability. I am not going to get to in depth with why I picked the target that I did, but here is the link to the forecast sounding for my target of Winfield if you want to look at it http://beta.wxcaster.com/cgi-bin/parse_skewt_trace_all.cgi?model=NAM&STATIONID=KWLD

I’ve never been a big fan of fronts as initiating boundaries. Always been a dryline man myself, but I’ll take what I can get at this point. The NAM, which I am leaning on in this forecast, has convection breaking out in two primary areas. One is in western Kansas north of the Dodge city area. The other one is down by the Winfield area.

I like the Wiinfield target because it is close to home first and foremost lol. Nah, just kidding on that. I will drive wherever I have to to get a tornado.
The real reason I like Winfield and the surrounding area is because the hodograph, which I linked above, has a sharp half circle curve to it and then displays plenty of length. CAPE >4000j/kg and deep layer shear AOA 50kts with creat a favorable environment for supercells.
I don’t really see any well defined front or wind shift to initiate convection in this area, but the NAM does fire off a lot of convection and it should happen along some sort of baroclinic boundary (front or OFB).
The main reason I like the Winfield target is because the windshear is better at all levels. Helicity is supportive of tornadic activity in both the 0-1km and 0-3km range. 1km SR winds are good for steady state storms with 30kts. 5km SR winds are around 25kts I think, which is very good and LCL heights are manageable although far from ideal.

It looks like this may be one of the last chaes we get for a while so I figure I might as well go out. I hate putting up the equipment though and I just took it down. I also have more work that I can every get done. If you have sent me an email and/or I’m supposed to get back to you I will. I have a million different things going on right now. My real job is keeping me buy and stressed as usual and then on top of that I am making a huge leap with my storm chasing company and am really hoping it will pay off. I’ve already dumped a ton of money into it and I am cashing in more saving and taking out a line of crdit to get it done. It is going to be a solid business come next year though.

I have to thank Wilson Electronics who we picked up as our sponsor several weaks ago.If you see the wilson logo on the side of my car that it why. If you know me very well you know I place a great deal of importance on integrity. I would NEVER go push a product I didn’t believe in, but Wilson is top of the line in their field. I’ve been using them since I was chasing with a weather radio in my soft top jeep. They are the best by far and have a great technical support team. I will be talking more about this and show you what equipment we ran this year and how much Wilson improved our equipment setup. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s alsome gear.
We also have one other major corporate sponsor in the works, but we’ll discuss that later. We are still trying to figure out who and how the Loaded Gun Chase Tours portion of the company is going to work. There are three other guys involved that all play important roles. We will have a meeting in the next week or two and then that should clear some things up.

I will tell you this, if you have considered coming chasing with us sign up now because I swear to you prices will be going up shortly. Next years setup is going to be top of the line and I have no doubt we’re going to book up by the end of januaryy. I am extremely excited about all this, but it is more work than you could ever imagine.

I will post another foresast later tonight.

Well it looks like we might just have another chase day left in us. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it until a few hours from now if I didn’t get comments on my previous post warning me about it. I have looked at a single thing so I have no forecast. I’m going to get on that though and post my forecast on here sooner or later.

I added a few hail pictures and a clip of video to my website from June 7th when we got into the softball hail by Oregon, Missouri. I put a video clip on the front page, but it didn’t publish properly and skips over a lot of what was in the video I tried uploading. I have serious problems uploading much from this laptop. It is so filled with syware and junk that I might as well throw it away. Good news though. I get my new home PC next week and that is a badass computer and I’ll be doing all my website work and video editing from that. I’m also replacing this laptop for a strictly chasing laptop and then I’ll use this as my backup chasing laptop, because it does actually run OK in the field with all the weather programs I use.

I will move the hail video from my front page to the storm report page that is linked on the home page today and put up video from a rotating wall cloud that we got right under on June 9th. I think it’s a lot better video as long as it loads right.

BTW its hard to tell how big the hail is in the video until we turn the car around in the road. Right after we get turned around look at the hail in the green grass on the side of the road that didn’t break when it hit the ground. There are several baseballs and softballs in there.

I have the pictures of the hail beating and the video edited and on my computer now. I just have to publish it to my website, which takes a while with the video since this laptop sucks.

I will do that and post the link on here tonight and then I will also post a forecast for the upcoming four or five days. That will come in a little while. I have to go walk duck around the lake first.

I’ve been busy with the chasing stuff over the last couple days so I haven’t gotten my softball hail beating pictures or video posted, but I’ll get it up on the front page of my website tomorrow.
We got a nice rotating wall cloud the other day too on a tornado warned storm in Elk county southeast Kansas. It came really close to producing a tornado, but didn’t quite do it. I’ll post some video of that too.

I haven’t had a chance to post any more of the pictures or video from the gorilla hail on Sunday since we chased again yesterday and am likely chasing again today. That will mean I’ve chased 5 out of the last 6 days. I pulled up the storm prediction forecast center’s forecast for today HOPING that it didn’t have any sort of a tornado threat close by, but there is. Soooo, now I have to start forecasting and get ready to go again. I’m starting to remember why I am ready for storm season to end by late June of each season.

I will post a forecast in a while and then tomorrow I will start getting pics up.

we are leaving wichita now heading west. I was going to stay in Wichita, but now that there is cu going up east of ddc and developing down highway 50. I want to get outside wichita a little ways and sit tight for now.

Tornadic Supercells seem likely across parts of central and southern Kansas. I made a rough map because I have done very very little forecasting but I wanted to get a post up because I have had a lot of hits already so I know people are waiting for it.
Not much has changed. I am probably going to stay in a north south line with Wichita until something persuades me to move, which I will certainly post on here. I’m just going to watch the front and watch for the best moisture convergence. Wichita may be in a pretty bad location today if the current trends do what I think they will. Here is my map. I will update again in about an hour.

SPC just came out with their update. They placed the greatest threat north of where I put it along the border. I don’t know what to think. Both models are showing convection tail ending southe of the Wichita to Hutchinson corridor so that is where you are really going to have to watch the tornado threat in my opinion.
Like I mentioned earlier, it is all going to come down to where the front is. I want to stay downstream of where I expect storms to fire and get on the tail end storms. The storms that are out ahead and further south of the clusters are what I want. You always want a storm with undisturbed inflow. That’s not always how it works, but it works more times than not.
We will have to see where the front is tomorrow and when accurate precipitation models start showing the southern edge of precip, I would draw a ling along that and straight north 40 miles and bet you there is a strong tornado in that box.

Well the GFS isn’t out yet. All I can pull is 18Z data on RAP from the GFS and it looks like it has the front a little farther north.

If the NAM is right tornadic supercells with strong and possibly violent tornadoes will be possible tomorrow over a relatively small area as long as convective mode unfolds in a favorable manner.

Here is the Enid Oklahoma sounding. I wanted something a little farther northeast of there where conditions should be even better for tornadoes http://beta.wxcaster.com/cgi-bin/parse_skewt_trace_all.cgi?model=NAM&STATIONID=KWDG
Here are some of the forecasted paramaters…
1km SRH of 300, 1km SR winds 41kts, CAPE above 3000, 5km 25kts, 3km EHI at 10, and the hodograph has the curvature of a fishing hook and is plenty long.
This would be an extremely potent environment for cyclic tornadic supercells. Some of those numbers like 1km SR at 40kts make strong tornadoes a very real possibility.

LCL heights are still a little high and I am worried about convection firing along a warm front that has convection going just north of there all day. Can a storm fire south of there far enough to develop and get rooted in the boundary? I don’t know. I’m not that smart when it comes to those things. I am smart enough to know that any storm riding that boundary without interference from other storms would pose an extremely serious tornado threat.

Conditions will be strong enough for tornadoes early in the day and only improve, so I want to be ready early. Where I target depends totally on the location of the front. If I move that will be based on satellite and/or moisture convergence trends. Right now going off the 00Z NAM I would park near the Kansas Oklahoma border and monitor the situation from there. The area from Medicine Lodge and southeast from there is exceptional for tornadic storms. Like I said my biggest concern is getting a supercell to fire a little farther south then the rest of the convection and to ride that boundary. If that doesn’t happen maybe we’ll get quickly maturing storms that can put down a tornado or two before moving into weak instability.

I will probably post an update after seeing the gfs. If I don’t I’ll update in the morning. Here is a map of the most likely area for violent tornadoes going off the NAM.

I think it looks like a pretty solid setup for tornadoes tomorrow. I literally just looked at it for the first time so I will have to forecast for a bit and I will post in an hour or two on the forecast, but from what I’ve seen so far I would put up a moderate risk with 15% hatched on tornadoes.

Well we were the red headed step child of mother nature today. We got on the tornado warned storm in northwest Missouri. It had good structure and was becoming organized. The tornado warning had just come out for it so I knew we were in good shape. The side/dirt roads suck up there by the way. Well then out of no where baseball and softball hail starts falling around us. There was just a few up front so we jumped in the truck to leave and then it quickly picked up. I’ve seen baseball and softabll hail before, but I’ve never seen it in high volumes like this. Usually the hail is sparse when it’s big. With this storm there was baseball hail covering the ground.

I told Eric drive south and east so we are trying to out run the storm because it was move east north east, but the hail kept getting worse. Well what happend is that literallly right as I parked to get out and watch the storm it right turned. Not a regular right turn but a 90 degree right turn and started moving south southeast. So instead of running and getting out of the hail we were keeping ourselve in it. There was some monter hail stones in there. Here is a link to pictures on my web page of the windshield http://www.loadedgunchasing.com/

It was just an unfortunate set of curcumstances. I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. I was watching the storm, we were several miles from a dry mesocyclone and then huge hail starts falling. Who in the hell is going to know that? It sucks tremendously, but at the same time it was an awesome experience to see the power of these storms. You feel totally helpless with hail that big falling all around you. There is no place to go and it is extremely violent. I’ll get the video up on the site for you to see.

we are leaving wichita now. target salina. I think we got a decent shot at a tornado if you can get a good storm off the triple point area. it needs to fire early enough too to get out into the warm sector a way where higher dewpoints and lowering temperatures through the evening will lower LCL’s enough for a good tornado threat.
I’ll update from salina.

We are on our way back from busting today, but the 00Z NAM looks good for tomorrow. The area between 54 and Hutchinson looks just fine to me. I’ll post in the morning.

Well that’s a tricky little forecast. The NAM now has 700mb temps down to 10C all along the dryline and is showing scattered precip all along it down into Oklahoma.

I am going to head north towards I70. I would like to get on a storm that fires in the I70 corridor along the dryline for a few reasons. It appears to have the best overlay of instability and SRH just northeast of there. I’ve liked that link kink bulge in the dryline for the last several runs and it’s right along I70 as well.

I gotta swing through Emporia and pick a guy up and then we’ll probably hit I70 and check everything out. Actually we have internet in the car so we should know whats going on. LCL’s were pretty damn high when I looked at forecast soundings this morning, but after just glancing at a map on wxcaster they weren’t that bad if storms can fire early enough to get east into the upper 60 dewpoints. I think I have about a 40% chance at best of seeing a tornado, I just really want to get out there and see a good supercell.

The one huge thing that bothers me and always does is veering 850mb flow. I absolutely hate that. It always screws up the tornado potential. If 850’s were backed tomorrow I would think I was in business. Veering 850’s will chop my confidence level down about 75% so now I think my chances of seeing a tornado are about 15%. I would like to pick up on a storm going up just south of I70 where 850’s back slightly more.

Screw it. I’ll take what I can get. I will see you all out there tomorrow. I’ll be the one wearing a bannana hammock (speedo)and a cowboy hat if you want to say hi. I’m going to try to get a little sun on my thighs in this 90 degree weather. If I start catching any odd looks or people think its in poor form to wear a speedo like that I have a back up pair of plum smugglers from when my dad used to coach softball. That will cover a little more thigh, but not much.

Well it looks like maybe I will chase tomorrow. The NAM is breaking out convection in north central Kansas and south of there along the dryline. Last night when it indicated this is was being cause by a weak disturbance in the 700mb layer that was cooling down mid level temps just enough for storms to kick off. I would go up to I70 or Concordia and go west from to about 20 miles east of the dryline. I don’t have time, but I will post more on this within an hour or two. I want to see what the storm prediction center says in their next update.

700mb drop off from 12 degrees to near 8 degrees with the temperature gradient running southeast to northwest. The cap seems breakable along an area in the Concordia to Phillipsburg area, although I haven’t seen a forecast sounding so I’m guessing on that.
For me it is a game where you get as far south as you can, but cheat north due to the stronger cap down south. 850 winds are stronger and backed more south of I70, but the cap is stronger as well.
I just now got the forecast hodograph for Concordia. LCL heights are high as expected, but forecasted temperatures for tomorrow are not far off from the convective temperature at 00Z. I am more optimistic we may break the cap between I70 and the Kansas-Nebraska border.

Friday
I’m not going to put much in to Friday’s forecast right now. I think LCL’s are too high down south for tornado and they aren’t exactly low up in the NE Colorado target/NW Kansas/SW Nebraska. I think 60 degree dewpoints is a pipe dream. Upper 50’s are reasonable, but if there are wide spread 60 plus dewpoints I will be shocked.
Mid level flow sucks up to 500mb, but good directional shear and moderate instability will be favorable for supercells. I don’t think there are going to be many tornadoes and if there are I think they’ll be small and or weak. I’d take a weak tornado in a second, but I don’t want to drive that far for a slim chance at a weak tornado.

Saturday
This has been a tough forecast. The cap is tough to judge. I still don’t know whether or not I am going to chase. I think I am finally starting to become content with the idea of playing up towards the warm front, but I’m going to hedge my bets with my initial target, which is going up to Hebron and then adjust west over towards Red Cloud before heading up towards Hastings and then I’ll fine tune the forecast from there. That or I’m not going to chase at all. The cap is going to decide that for me. I just hope I don’t get it wrong one way or another. It’s all going to depend on the location of the surface boundary. I’m going to play the warm front though.
There are some significant differences on the location of surface features between the NAM and GFS, but I’ll lean towards the NAM for now since the GFS has been all over the place already. We still have a few more runs to figure it out anyway.

Hopefully a storm can ride the warm front while staying somewhat discrete. Storm motions and the frontal boundary are pretty close to parallel, so there should hopefully be enough residence time for a storm developing on the warm side of the front to get going before moving in to the weaker CAPE. With good deep layer shear and moderate CAPE the environment should be favorable for supercells. SRH is quite good along the boundary, so obviously the key to tornadoes is going to be with storms riding along the front. The exception to this is if a storm can manage to fire along the dryline over central or southern Kansas, but that isn’t looking likely right now.

I am pretty busy so I haven’t finished my forecast. I will forecast as soon as I get home and I should have a forecast for Friday, Saturday, Sunday and the long range outlook posted by around 6pm, so please check back then.
I’m going to post a few pictures tonight too of all the crap I have to go through to get ready to chase lol. I’ll set up a web page and put them on there so you can just follow a link to it, but it’s getting ridiculous. We have emergency gear and flash lights in case a town gets hit since we are first on the scene (I’ve always brought a first aid kit for that reason) back up cameras, backup laptop, the football, batteries, two way radios. I fill the back of that Xterra with so much crap now that it takes me at least and hour and a half to get it set up right for a chase. I need a permanent chase vehicle that I can leave set up and that will be happening next year.

I will post the forecast in a few hours.

For the Douglas and Main readers, who are local residents, I wanted to clarify my forecast so I don’t scare the hell out of anyone.
On Saturday there is going to be a very strong cap in place, which works like a lid on boiling water and supresses storm development. In reality it is a layer of warm dry air that lies just above the boundary layer, which is the air mass at the surface.
The cap is a good thing and a bad thing for storm chasers. If you want big storms you need a cap to allow that energy to build up through the day and when it breaks you get explosive storms, but if the cap doesn’t break, you get blue skies. The cap is very hard to judge, but it looks like the cap with hold out on Saturday across most of Kansas, which will preclude a significant tornado threat. The conditions are there, but you got to have a storm first.

In the longer range it does appear that we are going to be staying in a fairly active pattern, especially in mid June, so tornado season isn’t over yet.

a href=’http://loadedgunchasing.com/blog1/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/fridays-map.gif’ title=’fridays-map.gif’>

Alright… I’m not terribly impressed with the tornado potential on Friday. There are two distinct targets that stick out in my mind. One is the southwest corner of Kansas and the other is the area spc highlighted up where nebrask, colorado, and Kansas all meet up.

The northern target has CAPE AOA 2000 in places because it shows dewpoints of 60 degrees being advected in there. I don’t think that will happen. Even if it does I still think there are some other problems. The wind profile throughout the atmosphere is very weak until you reach 6km or so. I don’t know why it’s so weak, but forecast soundings and weather caster still showed 40kts of deep layer shear which is adequate for supercells. The forecast sounding also showed decent inflow level winds. I don’t see that happening either with CAPE that is over done. The positives are obviously the backing surface winds and even if you don’t hit 60 the air is going to be pretty juicy relatively speaking.
The bottom line in my opinion is the lack of strong kinematics and high LCL’s will preclude a serious tornado threat over the area on Friday. Unless something changes, which it very well may, I’d go 5% on my tornado probability map largely because of the directional shear and moderate CAPE.

Now for the southern target. LCL heights are even worse down here, but kinematics are better. I also like the idea that an isolated storm or two could come off the dryline and have the whole are to themselves vs. more convection up north interfering with each other. Surface winds don’t back like they do up north, but there is still 15kts or so out of the SE which I’ll take any day. 700mb straight out of the west also make for good directional shear even though you don’t have easterly surface winds like you do up north. The killer for this area is the moisture. Mid 50 dewpoints??? That dog just ain’t gonna hunt. It’s June for god’s sake. We need mid 60’s. I think we’ll get a couple good looking high based supercells and that’t it.

So in conclusion on Friday I would be surprised to see a tornado report up north because of the directional shear, but neither the northern or southern target excite me enough to get me to drive that distance especially when we have Saturday to get ready for.

SATURDAY

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Right now I like Wichita as my target. I haven't gotten in to forecasting hard for saturday because I was watching Friday, but now that I'm loosing interest in friday I am gaining interest in Saturday so I'm sure I'll be on it like stink on a monkey tomorrow. I like the strong cap and I don't. Usually the cap will break in a few places in a situation like this, but there have been a few times in the last several years where i saw moderate to strong CAPE with a big dryline like this where it didn't. I think it will break and we'll get a few storms. I like the dryline straight west of Wichita and maybe a hair south. My only problem with this setup is that again mid level winds could be a little better. The moisture gradient could be a little tighter too though, but hell it's right next to home and we haven't had anything to chase this year so what am I complaining about.

I am working on my forecast right now and have been for about an hour and a half. I went over the 12Z data and am now looking at the 00Z NAM. The models aren’t helping us out much on this one. I am posting a forecast with a map for Friday within the next hour or so. I will probably just write the forecast for Saturday since it’s still 4 days out.
If 850mb winds don’t veer on Saturday, I think we could get a tornado outbreak.
I really need COD to update so I can see detailed maps to forecast, but it takes the longest so I’m going over rap and WXcaster right now. I will post as soon as my forecast is done.

I have to keep this really quick because I’m leaving work in a minute, but I have done some forecasting for Friday and think I figured out my target assuming the models don’t shift on us. I haven’t done my forecasting for Saturday so I’ll have to post about Saturday later.

I don’t have time to go into explanations on this either since I have to hurry.
There are two areas of interest. The NW corner of Kansas area highlighted by SPC and the area down south about where the Kansas border and dryline interset. I focused on both of these two places and have decided that I would rather target the southern area for a couple reason, again assuming the models hold true.

Down at the south target the cap has been an issue, but the latest runs want to break out convection and this area is much more likely to have discrete storms than the northern target. Dewpoints are going to be low, probably only making 58 or 59 which is going to be the tornado potential killer. LCL heights will be high and they will be low at the northern target, so the northern target probably will get more if any tornadoes. The southern area has stronger 850mb winds out of the south, while up north there are very weak 850 winds, but they are backed sharply. 0-6km shear is no contest. The southern area has much better wind fields with 25kts at 700mb and 40kts at 500mb. 0-3km SRH is pretty good ahead of the slight bulge along the border to. I’m going to take my chances on an isolated storm down along southern Kansas instead of playing the northern target where 90% of the chasers will probably go. I may change my mind though lol.
I will update later.