Street flooding, large hail, and another tornado makes for another $5.00 chase day in Colorado!

After getting drenched in torrential rain at my house in Boulder, I decided to head northeast to get in front of the developing late afternoon storms. Again, my primary goal was just to take all the gear through another test run but once again, Mother Nature produced quite a show. Southern Weld County was covered in hail, with many stones around one inch in diameter (one chaser reported hail up to two inches). Two cells merged into one large cell, a process which generated just enough shear to get things spinning (looking at the initial cloud structure and surface observations, shear seemed minimal today so I wasn't really planning a serious chase). Several funnels were reported, prompting tornado warnings. I stayed with the cell long enough to catch a view of one of the funnels. From my low contrast perspective, I could just barely see the funnel stretch and appear to make brief contact with the ground. This was later confirmed by one of the Denver Channel 7 storm chasers and thankfully, no damage or injuries were reported. No photos of the tornado this time because it was too small, poorly lit, and I was just a little too far away. I did get some nice shots of the updrafts thanks to a scoured atmosphere and a very defined rear storm line. Otherwise, I would call this a bust in the absence of good photos that I can use for any of my projects.

That being said, I only spent about $5.00 on this chase. Plus the water and soap to scrub the Weld County mud off the vehicle. So that's a total of $10 for two tornadoes this week. The cheap chasing is coming to an end however. Central Plains chasing begins soon and after these local chases, I think everything is ready. I'm now running signal enhanced mobile broadband in my chase vehicle, along with a couple portable surface weather instruments, GPS, and enough camera mounts to keep any photojournalist happy.