Day 3 of the Great Storm Chase!

Well, this is a day late but I was so exhausted last night that as soon as we got to the hotel I changed and crashed! We've been booking some pretty long days and it's starting to take a toll on my body. We did get to chase a little bit yesterday (day 3) to no avail really, unfortunately.

Derek and I were the Day 1 people, thus the radar watchers and deciders of where to move in for storms, and we found some decent opportunities in northwestern Nebraska. We went to see the Badlands earlier that day as we drove from Murdo to Rapid City area.



We were headed right for where we expected the storms to move in and then a couple spotters in our van looked behind us and saw a tower starting to build which gave a good sign that we might've actually been moving away from something important.



We stopped and played some football on a random road that gave us a great view of the tower as well as our original storm that we were following. We took some readings and then realized that everything was pretty much crapping out on us. We didn't have much CAPE, no helicity, not much punching through of caps, etc. The weather was definitely not on our side!






It's been really interesting to actually see what's going on on the radar live! It's great to be able to see how it looks on the radar and then just look out the window to get an actual view of what that's supposed to look like; talk about a learning experience! Watching the visible satellite and seeing the bright white on there and then looking out to see massive cumulus towers is just phenomenal! We've seen some pretty sweet sights even if we haven't seen a tornado yet...there's still hope!

Good night!