Bust in Colorado

Chase Recap:

Forecast

This was a potential chase day for almost a week leading up to it, with a nice shortwave ejecting off the rockies. The GFS had shown anywhere from Omaha/St Joe Missouri to Colorado being in play on Mon/Tue the 13/14. With very moist and unstable gulf air in place, I really expected 1-2 really good chase days.

I made the decision to stay the night in Fort Morgan, CO the night before while we were in North Platte. It was obvious we wouldn’t make it home until about 5-6 am if we drove home from North Platte, and it was hard to ignore the wave coming off the rockies in Eastern Colorado. Dewpoints and mixing ratios were quite high, I believe near 90th percentile.

Head to Eric Treece’s House

We woke up in Fort Morgan, CO and started jogging south towards Denver metro area. The plan was to go meet Eric Treece at his house in Elizabeth and then play the palmer divide. Unfortunately, storms fired very early, and we were freezing outside at Eric’s house as storms/rain showers came off the mountains and blew out a ton of cold air. If we wanted to see anything, we needed to get south in a hurry to near Campo.

Tornadic storm near Trinidad

We zig zagged our way south and east towards Limon and then due south. A storm was firing off the mountains at I-25 near Trinidad. It eventually went on to be tornado warned and produce excellent structure and tornado.

Where were we you ask? Stuck way northeast with bad road options fighting over how we’d get to that storm, which had become mostly linear, west of La Junta. We made a run west towards another storm as it petered out when it came off the mountains, and then another one before finally giving up and calling it a day and heading home.

Another bust. And a crappy trip to Montana and back.