2012--Day 9

Day 9

Pretty much everyone is in love with Fort Collins.  It has a very nicely developed business/retail area through the center of town, where after our typically late briefing (10 am local) we headed for Mongolian grill food (great!).  The briefing was confusing: SPC has our area in a slight risk, but while there seems to be good instability the shear is less than impressive, to say the least.  So we walked around the Oldtown area for a bit where a good fraction of our group fed the retail monster. 

We returned to the van to decide our next move: make our way northward toward Wyoming to occupy ourselves with cows, Dick Cheney, and (eventually) Devil’s Tower, or hang around and wait for convection to fire.  We checked the latest information, and a mesoscale discussion was issued for our area, as a severe thunderstorm watch was expected soon.  In fact, Denver/Boulder NWS is expected to launch a 19 UTC radiosonde to get a better idea of moisture, wind and instability.  There are pretty decent Cbs and Cu congestus to the east, so that’s where we’re heading for the moment.  Guess we’ll have to keep the good devil waiting. 

Even though I am a professor, I find that I can learn things from my students.  Fun fact of the day: apparently dads (read: old men) wear New Balance shoes.  Of course, my tan hikers are ‘stylish’ New Balance shoes—three words one would never expect to be strung consecutively in a sentence.  Nevertheless, I’m relieved to be considered ‘stylish,’ at least with respect to footwear.  Education really is a lifelong process.

It’s extremely interesting to attempt to figure out where and when severe thunderstorms will develop.  If we went strictly with our own forecasts, we probably wouldn’t have given much thought to chasing today.  Recall that SPC has this area in a slight risk, and we couldn’t see exactly what they were thinking.  Good thing that we have excellent mesoscale forecasters in Norman.  Heading east into Weld County, CO (the U. S. county with the largest number of tornado warnings), we were just alerted to a tornado watch valid until 9 pm local that includes our area.

We left Fort Collins for parts east down Colorado 14, a basically east-west road that runs through Weld County.  Encountered several storms there, some with rotating wall clouds and other interesting features.  There were several times where we needed to wait by the side of the road to wait for storms to develop or to prevent corepunching (or being corepunched).  We ran several cycles through the world’s noisiest car wash, with hail as large as 1.25 inches.  Some of the pictures have white streaks hanging in the sky—these are hailstreaks, and they are best avoided.  We must have spent three or four hours on 14, sometimes at breakneck speeds and quick turnarounds, as there were very few north-south options on our portion of the road.  As it turned out, there was a possible tornado around 6:40 pm local time (uprooted a small tree and threw it about 20 feet) in a town called Grover, less than 20 miles north of our location.  It was likely rain-wrapped, and there were no indications of rotation or any other clues on the radar of its existence.  There were also reports of possible tornadoes south and east of Denver—all of which occurred on what appeared to be a marginal day.

During our multiple sorties up and down Colorado 14 we noticed a couple of pastures with (likely beef) cattle grazing.  They must have been in the path of some of the hail that fell.  Gustavo said they must have been pummeled—I said they were being tenderized (many groans at this one).  One other interesting thing I noticed: during one of the storms they were all standing ‘parallel,’ facing the storms to the north.  Magnetic cows, perhaps?

Since we never really left northeastern Colorado, we decided to stay in Fort Collins for the night, at the same hotel—a first, two nights in the same place!  After dinner on College Street (provided by a server who had less of a grasp of the menu and possibly reality than me), we called it an early night.  Final tally for the day: 143 miles, a record low.  Hope you enjoyed the pictures!