South Central Kansas Chase 4/30/2024

Published on April 30, 2024

A conditional threat of severe storms developed across South Central Kansas during the afternoon of April 30, 2024. While the hail threat appeared to be the most dominant hazard, a few tornadoes were also possible, especially with storm-boundary interactions.

While the target area my team had chosen was in the Slight Risk – we had a good feeling that Northeast Kansas would see some more violent storms. Unfortunately, at least one fatality occurred from the tornado in Westmoreland Kansas, northeast of Manhattan.

We left Wichita about 3:30 with the target being 30 miles north in Newton. Storms quickly fired along a dryline just west of the I-135 corridor and slowly moved east.

The storm in Harvey County was the first to go tornado-warned. We were really unable to see any sizeable rotation, but it did have some moments where some lower-level convergence was occurring. After 30 minutes after the tornado warning came out, the storm had been overrun by over storms in the area, essentially cutting off the flow for tornadogenesis.

Contrast was nil at times – making it hard to decipher what was scud, what was a wall cloud and what rotation the wall cloud might have. We slowly made our way to a more isolated supercell near Rock, Kansas – about 35 miles south of our storm in eastern Harvey County.

Our storm near Rock, Kansas quickly went tornado warned and had a good amount of rotation for about 20 minutes. We did see a bowl-shaped funnel under a rotating wall cloud early on – but we could not see condensation to the surface.

We called the chase shortly after this – as terrain and data get more difficult east of the US-77 corridor in Cowley County, Kansas. However – on our way back to home chase base – we were delighted to see what the sky had to offer.

Sky-spanning Mammatus clouds filled the pre-sunset sky in Wichita!

The pictures just don’t the view justice – it was a prolific and fantastic view. A very nice end to a fun backyard chase!