Chasecation 2019 Day 9 – Watching For Flooding

While yesterday marked our return to Kansas and a better road network, we found ourselves dealing with a new difficulty we had yet to face in past chasecations; widespread flooding. What would normally be perfectly fine dirt and gravel roads have been turned to mush and/or become covered in water from the recent heavy rains.

Today the main storm target is even worse off with regards to flooding, with some major roads and even a few towns inundated by flood waters. Half of choosing today’s target will be figuring out what roads we can actually take that aren’t covered in water.

Though we were not able to catch the cluster of tornadic storms in far northeastern Kansas yesterday, we did manage to track the first significant storm for awhile before a flooded road cut off our way to keep up with it. It had a well-defined wall cloud for awhile, and looked like it was ready to produce if it had the low-level rotation. Sadly for us, that extra bit of rotation was not there. Only the warm front provided enough low-level spin for tornadoes to form that day.l