Colorado Supercell

[Tom Lynch]

This monster was moving south and we managed to get south of it, eventually, catching sight of a brief funnel cloud on route. We kept edging in to look for a tornado, which we eventually found. We had to keep moving south by 5-10 miles at a time and the storm kept closing in on us. It was drawing inflow from so many places and the feeder bands trailed virtually over heads out to the east. These can be seen in the video like the tails of a stingray.

Every time the storm tried to tornado it would draw air in from the surface and we all got sandblasted. Craig lost his cap at one point. He did run and get it back.

We then had to decide to stop retreating away because our next chase was 200 miles north of our current position and we needed to be back in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We were east of Colorado Springs. As we moved west to get to an interstate which would take us north we got caught by the core. I am sure others got the incident on video I had to concentrate on driving as we were being pounded by 3.5" hail and suffered a broken windscreen, Arron kindly filmed from our car.if I can I will post Arron's video.

As we were heading towards Colorado Springs we saw a huge LP supercell which looked like a barbers pole but was dropping huge hail and as we had a broken windscreen we had to avoid this cell.

This video is about 13 minutes long.

This is Arrons core punch video of that night BEWARE some naughty words used in this video. There are not many other words that express how big the hail stones actually are than the ones used. So apologies in advance.

Tom

Edited July 8, 2012 by Tom Lynch

[Gorky]

Here's a shot of the beast from when I'm guessing you were almost under it. It was taken around the time of the reported tornado although we stayed back some distance to admire it's structure, and missed the tornado... not that I'm particularly unhappy with that decision Might add a few more photos later from this day once I have them processed in Lightroom

Edited July 18, 2012 by Gorky