Bill Reid Art
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Wray Tornado
Artist: Bill Reid
The Wray Day, May 7, 2016, was another one of those storm chase intercepts where everything came together perfectly, following a couple of critical and correct decisions during the chase. Our Tempest Tours chase group had been watching some severe storms well west of U.S. 385 in northeastern Colorado for much of the afternoon, but these were not very interesting visually. We motored east to Wray and U.S. 385 where some newer storms were forming, and witnessed a pretty tornado to the northwest of Wray. This one was rather distant though, and was in the midst of the Yuma County sandhills. Its parent supercell continued to the north, and we stayed with it about halfway from Wray to Holyoke on 385. Would this storm produce another nice tornado? I wasn't sure, but the look of the storm was becoming a little less organized. Another new storm was in the works back to our south. It was south of Wray and was moving right towards us, along U.S. 385. It was would be an easy intercept, and I thought that maybe it would produce a tornado along that east-west "sweet spot" near Wray, where the previous storm had produced a tornado. We set up on a little hillside north of Wray, and watch the storm produce a couple of weak tornados with some dust whirls near the town. As the storm moved over Wray and came to within a couple of miles of our location, a prominent funnel cloud formed and soon touched down. Tornado! There was an issue, though --- it was pretty much coming right at us! I decided to move a little to the west to get out of the way. WAIT! Let's go east instead. Our little county dirt road took us east of 385 a mile or so, and the Wray tornado was right outside of our windows to the south. It wrecked a little farmstead that we had just passed by along this dirt road. We stopped and looked back to the west, with the view you see here. This shot was with the wide-angle 21mm lens. Another chaser stopped right behind our van and was equally astounded as we were!
From Storms
