Elbert County Chase
August 23, 2008 ~ Joe and I both decided to skip out on work to the dislike of our ladies and venture out onto the plaines to play in the 5% Tornado Risk. We made it out to eastern Elbert County in the early afternoon as the initial storms were moving out of the I-25 corridor. We set up camp on Highway 86 and watched the radar and the darkening skies, several areas of shear were present and one was getting stronger. As the storm moved south of 86 the structure started looking good and the shear showed 115 knots. At this point we bolted southward and paralleled the cell for several miles.
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The blurriness of this screenshot is due to being taken in low light at about 65 mph on a dirt road. Note the shear.
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The lowering was very ugly and wasn't very organized, but there was an interesting appendage that briefly took on a funnel appearance.
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I was lucky enough to get two lightning captures while we were in motion.
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This photo was taken looking west on a side road we pulled off on. The cell started to show signs of being outflow dominant around this time and the temperature began drop.
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Not really sure what was going on here, this was the area of shear that we continued to watch on radar, although it did weaken some.
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The storm structure was constantly changing and made for some cool shots.
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A shot of the scud hanging out over a ranch, the core started to get rained out at this point and we headed a bit further east to try out luck in some warmer air. Other than a rapidly moving roll cloud, there wasn't much to see and so ended the 2007 chase season with zero tornadoes for Eric & Danni, 2 Tornadoes for Joe.
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