By SARAH KESSINGER
Harris News Service
TOPEKA -- Kansas State Climatologist Mary Knapp was observing drought conditions in southwest Kansas Wednesday when she paused to snap a photo of a towering thunderhead east of Dodge City about 3:30 p.m.
Twelve hours later, Knapp witnessed the damage of that thunderhead's spawn as she drove along the trail of a tragic storm that slammed into central Kansas, flattening homes, schools and businesses and damaging others, including her work site at Kansas State University.
Knapp says Kansas is currently sandwiched between weather systems fueling turbulent skies across much of the state while producing drier than normal conditions in far southwest Kansas
This weekend should be calmer, she noted, but storms are again in the forecast for early next week.
The reason lies with the much cooler than normal conditions dipping into northwest Kansas and the warm, moist, Gulf Coast air pushing up from the South.
"When you have the battleground between those two masses, you have the severe weather," Knapp said. "That's where we are now. That's what's really triggering it."
The jet stream, a river of air way up in the atmosphere, has been running from the northwest Pacific Coast and down through the Rocky Mountains where it then "kinks" into Kansas.
From southwest to northeast Kansas and on into Missouri, Iowa and the Great Lakes region, Knapp said, the battle zone between pressure systems remains stuck.
"We watch it to see how storm patterns might develop," she said. "If they're vertical enough to reach the jet stream and intersect, you start getting that spin, where you get different wind speeds and the huge rotation that fuels supercell-type tornadoes."
The position of the systems, she said, has been very persistent for nearly a month.
"Repeatedly we've had storms fire along that same line."
With the aid of moist air flowing from the Gulf, flood-inducing rains are plaguing parts of the Midwest.
"This doesn't appear to be going to change in the immediate future," Knapp added. "We could expect to have a continuation of these storms if the jet stream doesn't move. A couple of days of severe weather, then calm weather, then the cycle starts over again."
However, southwest Kansas isn't getting much of that moisture, and drought is creeping northward, Knapp said.
Drought warning issued
The state recently declared a drought warning in five southwest counties and a drought watch in eight surrounding counties.
"They were very dry over the winter," Knapp said. "Everything is fairly dry. The flow of Gulf moisture is to the east, so there's nothing being added to the atmosphere that produces rain in that area."
That could change if the monsoon season in the southwest United States sends moisture off the Pacific into that corner of Kansas.
There have been "tremendous" winds, too, in western Kansas, she added, but no rain is making it to the ground in counties that have had just 10 percent of normal precipitation so far in June.
In contrast, southeast Kansas has had a whopping 210 percent of its normal rainfall so far this month.
Tornadoes and hail are in abundance elsewhere in the state.
"The tornado season has been later than we typically see it," Knapp said. "Generally, May is peak tornado season. Part of that is we've seen a late start to summer-like temperatures."
The season was all too real early Thursday as Knapp drove along Interstate Highway 70 and glimpsed mangled signs, trees and the damaged gas station at the exit to Chapman, which was devastated.
She headed on to Manhattan, where the K-State campus had been hit. While her home was fine, she said, Throckmorton Hall, where Knapp works, had damage to its greenhouse complex, already pounded by hail twice this year. And the air conditioning unit on the roof was under inspection Friday. It was a moderate hit, compared with some other structures on campus.
"It was an EF4 when it hit the Miller Ranch area (in the southwest part of the city) and an EF1 by the time it hit campus," Knapp said of the twister's intensity. "If it had stayed on the ground it would have taken out Westloop (shopping center) and apartments near College Avenue."
It flipped cars, uprooted trees and damaged buildings as it hopped diagonally across campus.
"It could have been tremendously worse," Knapp said.
For severe weather reports: www.spc.noaa.gov/climo
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