We started off our day dropping southwest from Sterling, CO towards the Denver area. Our plan was to camp out somewhere just east of Denver to catch storms once they crossed the metro area. As you can see below, we weren't the only chasers with this plan (each red dot shows a chaser). Several cells started firing along the eastern slopes of the Rockies shortly after noon (mountain time).
It wasn't long before the Storm Prediction Center went ahead and fired a tornado watch for the rest of the afternoon and evening.
We quickly got in position to intercept the southern most cell which became the most impressive one of the bunch. It wasn't long before it was tornado warned.
The storm had pretty nice structure with a decent wall cloud and a huge rain/hail shaft on its northern side.
At times, the storm had a large hook with signs of strong rotation. It ended up passing right over the KFTG radar site east of Denver (big black hole below). Rain wrapped around the southern side of the hook echo (and at times around the entire storm) preventing the best visuals into it at times.
At one point later during the storm, we watched a wall cloud rapidly form down to the ground. It was amazing how fast this happened (from nothing to the picture below in about 30 seconds).
This ended up being the storm's last grasp as soon after, convection started moving in from the south and filling in-between (right over our location). This cut off any safe viewing of the storm (probably wouldn't be able to see much with all the rain anyways) so we decided to bail southwest and call it a day.
Below you can see just how quickly the convection formed into one large clustered mess...
Overall...another good day. There were quite a few reports of some sort of rain-wrapped tornado with this storm. This seems probable based off radar imagery. It will be interesting to see if the National Weather Service out of Denver/Boulder confirms one did in fact touch down.
You can find some of Katie's higher quality pictures here. Today we'll be wondering south across eastern Colorado...conditions aren't looking the most favorable for tornadoes....but we'll see what we can find supercell wise.
-Hans
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