Whale's Mouth...

I'm sitting at a hotel in Fort Smith after a semi disappointing day of chasing... We woke after about 4-5 hours of sleep and drove from Amarillo, TX to Arkansas City, KS... After looking over a few more things we made our way just east of Wichita, KS to a town called Augusta... While eating at Pizza Hut we noticed supercells along a line that were starting to become fairly discrete, and pretty soon after that tornadic... The problem we faced was the city of Wichita! I'll admit that I thought it would be much worse east of I-35, so I figured the play east was the smarter call (better dynamics)... Let the storms cross I-35 so we can chase them east... I just didn't want to get stuck in rush hour Wichita traffic, but honestly it really didn't matter much today! Unless you were on the storm very near initiation, you had little to no shot at seeing a tornado today...

I'm thinking that the 850/700/500/300mb winds all being nearly lined up out of the SW most likely made the supercells line up and go linear fast... They tried to break up some, but outflow from multiple supercells caused precip to develop and filled in the gaps, while merging the storms... Oh well, these days happen! We did see two beautiful "whale mouths"... The first one was near Walton, KS on highway 50 and the second one was on I-35 south in-between Newton and Wichita... On the second storm we ran into some very small hail as well... It was a bust for us, but again these days happen all the time as a storm chaser... Again, you win some, and lose most! Overall, we did very well on this trip so I consider it a big success all around...

On a quick side note I'm going to send my Cromwell, OK tornado video to the NWS in Norman, OK... They have the Cromwell tornado listed as one large (.75 miles wide) EF-3 tornado... If you watch my video, we clearly saw two large tornadoes... I have been thinking about it all day and I'll have to review some radar data to verify... I'm thinking there are two possibilities... One being two updrafts in the same storm or two separate storms merging... I know that supercell repeatedly merged with cell after cell so I'm thinking that is a strong possibility... Honestly, I'm just curious because without a doubt there were two tornadoes... The EF-3 was so large (3/4 of a mile wide) that I'm thinking the two damage paths pretty much overlapped... Especially if you have one tornado producing EF-3 damage and the other is producing EF-0 damage...