It was a rather forgettable stretch of chasing that was wiped under the rug as my beloved kitty, Zipperfoot, passed away over the weekend a couple months shy of 19 years old.  After Thursday’s horribly disappointing bust, Ed and I abandoned the chase trip to make an all-night haul back home overnight Friday into Saturday so I could be there with my favorite floof bucket. As you know, I’m a cat dad, and this was my boy, and he waited til I got to him before passing. I am heartbroken, but so glad I was able to get to him…

Opted to play what I guess we can call the secondary target for Friday’s grand finale… despite a higher (possible upgrade) tornado risk across the Midwest, I opted to make the haul to Wichita from Des Moines and set up for the dry line play somewhere near the KS/OK border.  I have a slew of both meteorological and logistical reasons for selecting this target, but given all I have seen thus far, it’ll definitely play as the day’s secondary target. Two big questions for the southern target include how long storms can remain discrete and IF any storms can fire…

Busy day yesterday in southern Minnesota, which included my first two Minnesota tornadoes since the Wadena event in 2010.  The image above was the second tornado east of Truman, which briefly fully condensed to the ground.  This was the longer-lived of the two, not terribly strong, but certainly a looker.  The first one was from the same parent storms a few minutes prior with a brief, non-fully-condensed touchdown, with several minutes between the two ground contacts.  It’s not entirely out of the question this was one tornado, just had a multi-minute gap between contact, but we’ll see what the surveys…

The weekend setups became a wash for me, despite Saturday giving some play to pretty every place I targeted at one point or another.  The issue for me was that despite an early alarm that would’ve allowed me to hit any target, including the further east target, I had a low-end kitty cat emergency that I had to tend to, which by the time it wrapped up and I returned the kitty home, it was already after noon, and thus pretty well ended any hope I had to get on anything reasonable.  The good news, the kitty is at home…

Quick evening note; will travel my way out I-70 tomorrow, leaving a bit earlier in the morning than I would for a typical ‘travel day’ just in case a storm can get going in central Kansas in the afternoon; not expecting a ton out of it, but given the Sunday setup, this sets me up well.   Initially thought about cruising into Burlington mid-afternoon to see if the storms in Colorado would be worth anything, and I am just not convinced they’ll amount to enough to dedicate missing any central Kansas potential, nor sacrificing a full day’s drive out east.  Some…

Looks like things will kick off for me tomorrow… I sat out yesterday and today, and while I am not formally planning to chase tomorrow as I am playing it as a positioning day, there are some potential storm interactions I could have in far eastern Colorado tomorrow afternoon, so I’m not writing off tomorrow yet, but it’ll likely be a ‘just cause I’m there’ type of thing. As I eluded to in my previous entry, nothing in the coming days looks ‘HISTORIC’, or end of the world.  As is typical with these things, there is a lot of click-bait…