West Central Kansas Supercell

The final chase of a 10 day chase vacation took place in West Central Kansas on May 28th.  Wes Adkins and myself departed from Amarillo during the morning, northbound to Boise City in the Oklahoma Panhandle.  After a data check, we saw the potential for discrete thunderstorm development in the vicinity of a possible pre-existing outflow boundary over western Kansas.  We departed for this location, with a thunderstorm developing over our target during the drive north.  As we approached the base of the storm near Tribune, we spotted a cone shaped funnel extending not quite halfway to the ground.  This funnel dissipated en-route, but two separate wall clouds developed in its wake, one to the west, and one to the east.  The western wall cloud attempted to go through an occlusion, but being that it was embedded in outflow from the more dominant eastern updraft core, it soon dissipated.  We were then cut off from the eastern wall cloud due to a large rain/hail shield.  So, we drove south to Syracuse, then east beneath a second storm that was merging with the northern storm.  This complex developed into a line segment.  We followed along for a while taking pictures of a shelf cloud that spread across expansive fields of wheat.  After an hour of chasing outflow, we called it a day and headed to Garden City for dinner.