Baca County Beast Reflections...

Good evening ladies and gentlemen...

Currently sitting in our quite luxurious accommodation at the La Quinta Inn and Suites in Dodge City, Kansas where I'm composing my first ever (and hopefully long-awaited) blog entry. We're heading to NE NM/SE CO/W OK Panhandle tomorrow. Marginal setups are usually maximized in favored upslope regions (as we saw yesterday!), so we feel this corridor will have the greatest chance of supercells and perhaps a cheap tornado.

Shifting gears back to yesterday's display of atmospheric perfection, violence, and overall grandeur, I remain in absolute awe of what we witnessed. A book purchased for me by my father, Steven F. Hovanic once stated that 2% of the world's population will see a tornado in their lifetime; one has to wonder how much more the percentage would decrease if you changed the stipulations to "how many people will see a large violent tornado from close range in their lifetime?" You would have to feel the percentage would drop exponentially.

Pausing to reflect further on yesterday's events, the sheer shock and surprise of when/how the tornado developed make the results that much more incredible:

1) We had been chasing the storm for nearly 5 hours before the large/violent tornado developed. Within the first 2 hours of the storms lifecycle, it obtained significant organization and looked a threat to produce tornadoes frequently, during this period the storm produced 2 fairly brief tornadoes.

2) The storm then proceeded to wrap its low-level mesocyclone in rain and become a 'high-precipitation' supercell. Often times, once this occurs, visibility of the "bear's cage" (the area where tornadoes form within a supercell) becomes obscured, except for those daring souls who wish to place themselves in the path of any possible tornado, or those brave souls who have no qualms battling massive hail stones which may be very close to the tornado. As a result, the best time for easily/safely observing the storm is done, and the remainder of the chase often becomes a frustrating "what can we see looking through the rain/hail?" type of event.

3) Continuing on from #2 above, the remarkable thing about yesterday's "Baca County Beast" was its ability to continually develop a new low-level mesocyclone to the south/southwest, thereby keeping the new mesocyclone precipitation free for a long duration of time. That being said, after the first two hours of the storm's lifecycle, it seemed to grow increasingly high-based, despite continuing to exhibit very rapid rotation. This will make producing tornadoes for the storm much more difficult as the cloud base physically increases in distance from the ground. Anyhow, for reasons that will be discussed in a future blog post aimed toward the technical crowd, the supercell almost instantaneously decided it would begin to lower its cloud base as it reached far SE Colorado and begin producing monstrous tornadoes.

After observing at least 50 or 60 high-precipitation supercells in my storm chase career, this was the first time I've EVER seen a storm "come out" of its extremely high precipitation phase (where it likely had a very cold Rear-Flank Downdraft) and begin producing visible/high-contrast tornadoes again. This blog post has become long-winded enough, so I'll stop here.

Regards,
Chris Hovanic