March 12, 2006 Sedalia, MO Tornado

I left home about 9:30 in the morning with my initial target being Northeastern Kansas. By the time I reached Kansas a tornado watch was issued for the area reaching all the way to Illinios. I noticed some towers going up on sat near ICT and not much later some good radar returns. I decided to head to I-70 and try to get in front of these fast moving storms as they approached the Southern Kansas City area. By the time I got to Lenexa I had one tornado warned storm already to the north of me and another tornado warned storm quickly approaching from the south. It didn't take long for the southern one to get to my location. Neither storm looked very impressive and I let them both go knowing I would never be able to keep up with them, especially in a metro area like Kansas City. During this time I had been in contact with Mike Hollingshead who was trying to get ahead of the next line of supercells south of Kansas City. I knew I could never make it down there as they appeared to be the best storms on radar so I decided to just continue trekking east towards Warrensburg, MO and let the storms intercept me. By the time I reached Warrensburg, the first supercell was right on top of me. I was able to see some good structure with a more elevated horseshoe appearance but like every other storm on this day, once it passed north of your position, the chase for that storm was over. With the tail-end charlie my last option, I continued east towards Sedalia, MO. Once again when I just as I reached the town, I was getting pounding by the core of the storm.


I made it just outside of town and outside of the precip when I suddenly noticed the tornado approaching me from the southwest.


This tornado never did have a full condensation funnel but you could see lots of dust and debris being kicked up.

At this point in the chase account, I would like to remind fellow chasers to always check your camcorder to make sure the record button is turned to "on". When I jumped out of my car to continue recording, I hit a bunch of buttons on my camcorder and had display screens all over my viewfinder. To remedy this, I simply turned off the camcorder and turned it back on and started recording again, well I thought I hit the record button but didn't. I ended up missing about 4 minutes of the tornado because of this. There was some good footage lost but the majority of it was of the tornado while I has driving as this thing was hauling to the northeast. The portion I missed didn't have much of a debris cloud but the condensation portion of the tornado started to rope out. The tornado reminded me a lot of the Maxwell, NE scorpion tail that I had chased on 6-13-1998. A local captured this part on video. to see it go HERE to see the video. I seem to do this during and important stage of a chase at least once a year, hopefully I got it out of the way early this year.


As I continued east, the condensation funnel was completely gone and I thought the show was over when suddenly I see the debris cloud tearing through a farm field again.


At this point the tornado wasn't very strong. An F1 rating would be pushing it. It almost seemed like a big dust devil but on occasion it would start tearing something up again. I then let it pass directly ahead of me on the highway.


With the weakening tornado just to my north it sweeps through another farmhouse causing some damage and kicking up debris.

After that, the tornado was gone as was the supercell because I could not keep up. I made my way up to I-70 to head back west when I got caught in a traffic jam due to an accident. After finding an alternate route I made my way back to Kansas City. As dark was approaching, yet another tornadic supercell was heading in my direction but I really didn't want to have anything to do with it after experiencing the speed of the previous 4 tornadic warned storms I had chased that day, and the fact that my laptop decided it had enough chasing for the day leaving me without any radar.

Notes:

This day turned out to be an outbreak of historic proportions. One that will not be soon forgotten. Even though there was a large number of tornadoes, they were very, very difficult to chase due to the storm speeds. My chase this day was 99% luck as you had no chance trying to keep up with a storm once you intercepted it.

While scanning the local radio stations in the KC Metro, I was in disbelief how poor the severe weather coverage was during the tornado warnings. Only two stations I heard broadcast the tornado warnings and quickly went back to music. The rest seemed to care less. This is typically a problem on the weekends but I have never heard it this bad before. Hopefully the TV coverage was much better.

Once again a thanks to Mike Hollingshead for insight and some radar updates once my laptop crashed.

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Last Update 2006-03-18