After three days of chasing, including one 1000+ mile day (for an idea of distance, we could have driven to Canada) and one fairly intense outbreak day, I'm back in Fort Worth for some much needed rest. Right now, it looks like tomorrow will offer some upslope opportunities in southeast Colorado, with the next big piece of energy ejecting into the Plains in the Wednesday-Thursday timeframe. Following that, another system will likely impact the Plains on Saturday, setting the stage for a potentially active week ahead as a trough sets up out west and continuously pops out shortwaves. In other words, things don't look to be quieting down any time soon.

I have a couple of unexpected gear problems to work out, and having not anticipated hitting the ground running so hard out of the gate, I might skip out on the mid-week system if it doesn't look all that impressive and/or ends up far, far away. I might prefer to rest up more in anticipation of a big week beginning as early as Saturday.

Anyway, on to this Sunday's Kansas City area chase...

We began the day in Winfield, KS after getting way too little sleep, hitting the road early for northeast Kansas, in front of the developing king of all surface lows. By the time we reached Emporia, explosive development was already occurring directly overhead, so we jumped off the Kansas Turnpike and wound our away about the area southwest of Lawrence in an attempt to better position ourselves on the developing storms. The storms, however, were having a difficult time getting rooted in the boundary layer, zipping off to the north and northeast at breakneck speed given the incredible mid and upper level winds. We eventually managed to keep up with one developing storm to the south of Lawrence that eventually moved over the city and fizzled out. It was still an impressive storm-to-be initially, however, the updraft shooting up and corkscrewing in what seemed like fast-forward directly over our heads - an indication of what sort of wind profiles we were working with that afternoon.

As new, less-than-impressive storms began to fire to the north and southwest of Topeka, we decided to take advantage of the opportunity to reposition to the eastern side of Kansas City while things were still getting organized. We took the southern route around the metro area and then turned north on the eastern side of town, continuing on to Kearney, just north of Liberty, MO. It was about this time that a storm finally began going tornadic to our west in Leavenworth County.

Expecting the Leavenworth storm to take off to the northeast in our general direction, we repositioned to the northwest near Smithville. Poor terrain and intervening precip made viewing the approaching storm difficult, but we believe we caught sight of the Leavenworth tornado as it crossed the Missouri River, approaching Platte City. Until I see an official track for this tornado, I can't be sure if what we saw was the tornado or not.

As it became clear that we were stuck in intervening anvil precip between two storms - the Leavenworth storm and the Wyandotte County storm approaching northern Kansas City - we decided to drop south on 169, jumping on 435 and heading east in a heavy rain and hail core. Things got a little hairy here as we tried to figure out where we were relative to the updraft on the storm coming out of Wyandotte County. Jeff Gammons did a great job providing us with continuous radar updates, allowing us to dive back in front of the updraft again just west of Liberty. From what I can gather from preliminary reports, the storm was actually producing a tornado during that general time period in the Gladstone area, a couple of miles to our south.

When we popped out of the precip near Liberty, however, the storm wasn't producing a tornado (as far as we could see), but we were very close to the circulation - so close, to be honest, that we had a hard time finding it, being almost overhead. We drove back and forth on 152 between 435 and I-35, avoiding frightened locals taking cover under overpasses, trying to get a feel for what was going on. As we approached the intersection of 152 and 435 on the west side of Liberty, the first real indication of a developing tornado became evident roughly a mile or so to our south-southwest: a broad but well-defined area of rapidly rotating, wispy rain curtains crossing I-35.

We continued east slowly into the edge of Liberty, approaching the intersection of 152 and 291. At this time, our winds began to pick up out of the west; on my video, I mention something about outflow, but outflow it was not! Rather, we were on the back side of a tornadic circulation! After closer examination of my video from this moment, such becomes fairly clear, with trees near us being impacted by strong westerly winds while a large flag 1/4 mile ahead is being impacted by strong northerly winds. You do the math.

As our winds began to increase, a trash can fell out of the sky fairly close by (yes, fell out of the sky). Meanwhile, small pieces of debris, dirt and leaves were being pulled into the circulation from west to east on top of us. This flow of debris then shifted from north to south as larger pieces of debris were lofted in the air directly in front and above us, floating as if permanently suspended. We turned around and ran away to the west, climbing a small hill into a parking lot, the 4Runner's V8 engine desperately fighting the inflow jet, which we estimated to be a sustained 70-80 kts (80-90 mph) by that time. With some effort, we made it back to the intersection of 152 and I-35 as the tornado continued into Liberty proper a mile to our east, our view obscured being on the back side. For all intensive purposes, however, we had been within the tornadic circulation, and perhaps as close as 1/2 mile from the main damage track. Once the more detailed damage survey is made available, I'll be able to make more sense of all of this.

In order to reposition, we blasted north on I-35 for a short distance and then jumped on Hwy. 69, heading northeast to cut back in front of the circulation. Unfortunately, we found ourselves back in the rain and hail core just north of the meso, not emerging again until between Mosby and Excelsior Springs. On the west side of Excelsior Springs, we finally caught glimpse of the tornado again to our south, a large wedge emerging from the precip. By now, the tornado had already covered 10 miles, having followed us up 69.

As the tornado became obscured by rain, we continued east into horrible terrain in Excelsior Springs, finally putting some distance between ourselves and the circulation and capturing a good view again just southeast of Wood Heights. By now, the tornado had dissipated, but a broad area of wrapping rain curtains with multiple areas of rotation and occasional multi-vortex type spin-ups was approaching the town. What I would call this, I can't say; however, if damage occurred in Wood Heights, I would expect it to show up in the official damage survey as the last moments of the Liberty-Excelsior Springs tornado, which by then would have traveled almost 20 miles from start to finish.

Of course, once we finally found ourselves with a good view of the updraft, the storm began gusting out. We continued on to the east in an effort to stay in front of the storm, eventually letting it pass us by near Norborne. The storm was still trying to tighten up and produce wall clouds, but was quickly undercutting itself before anything could truly get going. The storm looked to be toast, so we waved goodbye and wandered north to Stet to check data. None of our storms were looking all that great by now, with the best storm in the immediate area then approaching Sedalia to our southeast. We weren't fully aware of how impressive that storm was, however, until we had thrown in the towel and began heading back west to pick up Hwy. 69 again north of Excelsior Springs.

We retraced our route down 69 back toward Liberty, listening to coverage of the tornado damage on the radio. All roads leading into Liberty were blocked off by local law enforcement, creating a deadlock traffic jam along many of the surrounding surface streets as we jumped back on I-35 and headed into the heart of Kansas City. Meanwhile, a rather scary looking but high-based "storm" along the trailing cold front behind the low had moved into northwestern Kansas City, making for an interesting sight as the sun set behind it. We eventually stopped in the Shawnee/Mission area for dinner, the line of storms along the cold front finally putting down some precip the minute we parked in front of the restaurant. As a result, we had to sit through a 10 minute pea to marble size hail core that sounded and looked far worse than it should have.

After dinner, as we climbed back into the truck, a young man and his friend walked up and asked if we were storm chasers. He turned out to be the son of the MIC for NWSFO Kansas City/Pleasant Hill - an amazing coincidence following an amazing day!

Obviously, it was a very big day, with damaging, long-track tornadoes not only in the Kansas City metro area, but also across other parts of Missouri, Kansas, and Tennessee. There's nothing I can really say about the loss of life and property, but I can say that it was an incredible, intense chase, even despite our continuously bad viewing angles of tornadoes no more than a mile or two away. In the case of the Liberty tornado, I can honestly say that such was the closest I have ever been to a tornadic circulation (being within it, for all basic purposes), an experience that merits more detailed description in a future post.