College of DuPage Storm Chases

1993

1993 was a year of supercells, most of which were HP, and no tornadoes for the COD teams. However, many of these storms were very impressive. Our first week in early May had a lot of promise (we even had the infamous "strong storms red" on those extended Weather Channel Maps). Looking at the short range, we knew we'd end up in the southern Panhandle region and the extended had us believe we'd be moving more into the Northcentral regions. It worked out for the most part except that we went from the northern/central Panhandle regions towards central TX and then onto the Houston/College Station areas. We had a quasi-dryline most of the week, however a strong shortwave, or any shortwave for that matter, never came out of the deep trof in the West. Most of the mid-level flow was rather week and the convergence along the dryline wasn't very substantial, as pressure falls were non-existent. We ended up with some training cells the first couple of days. With each day, the mid level flow became a bit more westerly and that helped, but all in all, it was not the most photogenic week, to say the least with bountiful moisture and week mid-level flow. With week low level winds to boot, most of the meso's stayed in the mid and levels before heavy rain would fall through and gust the storms out. All in all though, in was an intersting week.
This is one supercell in the central Panhandle. It came out of a Severe Thunderstorm watch and again, it had very defined mid level features, but very little in the way of surface inflow.
Here's an early picture of a supercell we caught near Abilene a few days's later
The next storm we caught up to was a fantastic non-tornadic supercell just West of Big Springs, TX. At one point we were significantly due east of the updraft region when hail seemed to fall from clear air. Rather strong updraft in this storm. It might have become tornadic but towards late evening, about a half an hour after this picture was taken, another weaker thunderstorm formed to the south and the produced outflow strong enough to eventually mess up our supercell.
Our second trip, in late May just before Memorial Day Weekend, brought us to the Wyoming for our first trip. Although the temps were a bit cool, the upslope that day brought us a pretty neat little storm that did some unique rotating along the shelf cloud. Some of us saw some possible debris and maybe even a small rope-like tornado in the midst of some rain...but it was rather hard to tell with the numerous rain bands. None the less, a interesting little storm to start of the second trip.
Later that trip, we worked our way down to Western, KS. This supercell near Jetmore KS intially looked very good with a rather large visual vault before rain fell right through the vault and later right through the updraft as the only shear we had that day was some very weak low level direction turning. The mid and upper level winds were rather weak this day. Here's a close up of the updraft region. The little white area in this image is a the last glimmer of sunlight that would appear in this storm. The storm would die out a short time later.
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