May 24th, 2009, Wheatland, WY Flooding Hail Storms
We
awoke in Denver, CO with a number of options: play in Wyoming, head up to
central Nebraska, or stay in Colorado. As of our group meeting Roger liked the
conditions up north, assuming the cloud cover that was up there at the time
cleared out to allow surface heating, so we proceeded up I-25 to Cheyenne, WY
and then stopped to observe. It was a tough call as storms were firing down on
the DVCZ and also north of us up near Wheatland. Again drawn by the better
conditions up north we targeted a storm in that direction near Wheatland, WY
that was dumping copious amounts of hail as it came off the Laramie Range. After
stopping to take structure shots from a distance of about 20 miles neat
Chugwater, WY, the first updraft had started to fizzle but additional cells were
developing on it's flanking line so we targeted those cells and closed in for
the intercept. After watching the big rain and hail cores pass, along with some
nice cloud to ground lightning, we went hail hunting and soon found ourselves in
flash flood conditions. GRLevel3 estimated that 3 1/2 inches of rain had fallen
at our location from this storm. We also drove through hail fields where hail
was stacked up 6 inches high at some points.
After deciding the roads were too flooded to continue poking around the back
roads for hail, we decided to call it quits on that storm and start heading
south since we had to be in
Pueblo
that evening. We kept an eye on the pop-up thunderstorms all around us, but
nothing too interesting happened and we eventually had dinner south of Denver on
our way to our hotel in Pueblo, expecting to head to Texas between Lubbock and
Amarillo the following day depending on how the morning model runs looked.
Total mileage for the day: 459 miles.
SPC
Convective Outlook SPC
Tornado Prob.
NOAA Storm Report
All pictures (C) Richard Hamel 2017.