SPC Convective Outlook SPC Tornado Prob. NOAA Storm Report
June 17th, 2004 , Pueblo CO Supercells
More chasing around Lamar. We chased 2 or 3 storms and got back to the hotel in less than 200 miles of driving! After chasing a junky storm west of La Junta, we got on a trio of supercells east of Pueblo. The farthest storm from us had a very nice liberty bell updraft but was being cut off by the other two so we chose the southeastern most storm to chase. The one we chose to target eventually became a nice barber pole with lots of cascading motion at the base, but it could never focus it's rotation to create a tornado. This was most likely because it was ingesting cold inflow air rather than warm moist air. The inflow was absolutely flying into this storm! Once the inflow stopped, the very high shear quickly blasted the updraft over and left it flattened out. We then tried to get back towards Lamar to chase another bow echo (the junky storm we let go re-intensified well east of La Junta and eventually lined out) that was nearly identical to the June 16th storm except much weaker. We got back too late to chase the storm before it turned into a typical squall line, but the mammatus left behind were the best I’ve ever seen. We then settled in for our second straight night in Lamar. Blecch!!
SPC
Convective Outlook SPC
Tornado Prob.
NOAA Storm Report
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| In the distance behind our storm, another supercell with a nice liberty-bell updraft. | Lowering very close to the ground east of Pueblo near Avondale, CO. | Nice "barber pole" updraft to this storm. | One the inflow started to die, the high speed shear environment quickly resulted in the updraft being blown over. |
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| Back at the hotel in Lamar, AWESOME mammatus! | All kinds of good stuff in this shot: mammatus at sunset, a thunderstorm in the distance casting an upwards shadow on the cloud deck, and roll clouds from another storm below. |
All pictures (C) Richard Hamel 2017.