Day 8 of the Great Storm Chase!

Today was another incredibly long day...probably the longest overall of the trip thus far. We left Denver, CO at about 6:30 am MDT and got here to Abilene, KS at about 7:15 CDT meaning we had about a 14-hour or so driving experience today.

We headed out with the prospects of following some decent-looking models and soundings for good storms in northeastern Nebraska but they crapped out on us. It was SO disappointing and disheartening to do so much work and make so many sacrifices to get to this storm on time and have it not even form. One of our biggest problems, a lot really, was lack of moisture. Our dew points were so low and our temperatures were so high. We had temperatures all around the area around the upper 80's into the 90's and we had dew points near the 40's and 50's--absolutely ridiculous and horrible for any kind of decent cloud development. We had the surface heating in place but no moisture to create the type of warm, moist, buoyant air that we need to create that convection into the storm. The lack of moisture didn't allow for that and it also shoved the LCL way too high for our cloud bases. Because of the high LCL, we didn't have very good latent heat, a cap too low to allow for vertical development, and low CAPE values. Another big issue we had was the warmth of the air above our cap. Normally, the cap forms where the inversion occurs, when the layer of air above that point is warmer than the air below it (the LFC level), but the inversion was so warm that the parcel of air rising could not break through that cap to create more vertical development. The warm air is needed to rise because it is less dense than cold air, thus "floating" easily to the upper part of the atmosphere through the more dense air, like a hot air balloon. The air inside the balloon has to be heated in order for the balloon to continue to rise. When the person stops heating the air, that's when the balloon starts to sink back down (the air inside the balloon becomes colder than the environment. The problem was, the air above the LFC level was so warm that the buoyant parcels of air (thermals) were too cool relative to the air aloft to break through that cap. This activity was pretty evident as we saw the clouds aloft looking very fair-weather. The cumulus clouds were not building much at all and there were definitely not many towers forming at all either. There did seem to be some decent amount of shear aloft though as we were able to see the top of the towers that did form somewhat shift over to the side of the bottom of the cloud. Unfortunately, nothing much else was working on our side to create any type of storms much less a super cell.

Other than that we spent the entire time driving, obviously. We did stop in the part of Kansas that is apparently the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states of the US...great...haha. Also, I did talk to Steve Simpson on WIBC 93.1 FM in Indianapolis today. They've been following our trip and interviewing some of us most each day. Today I had the honor of interviewing but because of lack of communication, I didn't interview as long as they normally do because the segment was most of the way over by the time we finally got a hold of them. The interview can be found on http://www.wibc.com/simpson/.

Well, tomorrow looks like a positioning day for Sunday so yes, more driving! It looks like we might be heading back up to northern Missouri or so but I'm not completely sure on that. Oh and I jammed my finger somewhat bad today but minor details..it'll be okay. Hope for the best! We need bad weather fast!!

Goodnight!