April 12, 2012 Chase near Goodland, Kansas

Chase season has begun, and a bit early at that, thanks to a Spring that seems to have roared in a good five weeks before she was due.  My first chase of the year was on April 12, 2012 in Kansas.  I started out by driving down to Dodge City, before adjusting north as the weather observations rolled in later in the day.  I spent a good deal of the afternoon chilling out at an automated gas station in Brewster, Kansas.  Quite a few other chasers had the same idea; just sit there and watch storms try to get going as they rolled to the north-northeast.  

Sadly, we sat and sat and sat, and not much happened.  Eventually, most chasers either picked a random storm or gave up and dropped south into Oklahoma, as the better storm setup the next day was down there.  

 Eventually, I too took off after a pseudo-random storm (I say pseudo-random because it really wasn't much to look at other than having a better updraft vault than most of the storms that had been rolling by).  This storm wasn't amazing, but it did eventually transition into a storm with some very pretty structure.

 This was shot after the sun went down, so the contrast isn't so great, but here you can see the updraft vault of the storm has taken on a very "LP" barberpole type look.  An LP supercell is a type of spinning storm that doesn't produce much precipitation.  What's happening here is that the upper level winds are so strong that they are literally blowing the updraft of the storm into a more diagonal shape and stretching it out.  The bottom of the updraft is at the center of the image, the top of it is at the upper right of the image.

A closeup of the updraft base -- I love how smooth the rotation makes the updraft look.