how the pros do their work.
We headed out to start out in southeastern South Dakota and as we watched to see where things would start popping up we found ourselves flirting with the South Dakota, Nebraska border. The thing that saved us the most in actually finding storms today was just looking out the window. We started seeing some cumulus towers starting to build so we parked and watched them for awhile. We noticed that a lot of them were building and building fast. We needed to see if they'd break the caps and if more than one would do it...they did! We kept checking the visual satellite imagery and the radar to see if and when they'd start showing up and it took awhile but we were with that storm from its birth until close to its death!
We kept changing our trajectory to intercept the building storm but some of us were still skeptical about how severe it would actually get. After all, we'd seen towers build and dissipate before. We decided it was our best shot for the day so we kept following the clouds and predicting their movements and it finally started to pay off. The clouds were building fast and they were starting to join forces leaving an amazing sight!
The building storm finally starting showing up on the satellite and radar and we were finally able to get a better idea of what these storms were thinking and where they were heading. We followed them for a good while and even saw some mammatus clouds, shelf clouds, a hook in the storm, inflow, and what looked like some mesocyclones trying to form. All of which looked promising for a possible tornado...but that's wishful thinking at this point.
We followed and chased and were in great location all day but the storms started to dissipate at around 7 pm or so, but not before it allowed us all to get some pretty amazing pictures! The cells joined too much to create a squall line, which doesn't bode too well for tornadoes usually.
We stopped in Broken Bow, NE for some dinner at McDonald's and while we were leaving the parking lot we noticed a pretty good deal of inflow building into the sector of the squall that was to our north. We were going to look for a place to stop and take a few pictures but while looking we decided to check it out on our radar to see if there was any rotation or shear associated with the cell we were seeing. To our surprise, there was! We had a great deal of shear in that cell and we even had a meso-marker pop up within it. We quickly got back into chase mode and we were all instantly in a great mood again. We chased like never before--mainly because we were losing daylight and fast.
We kept a look on this storm and we were finding all kinds of roads to take to get closer. We had to be careful that we weren't getting into the "Bear's Cage" though because that's the most dangerous part of the storm where you can hit a lot of damaging hail and a lot of rain and then once you get right past that there could easily be a hidden tornado. Van 1 had their Threat Net going and in Van 2 we were keeping a close eye with GR Analyst.
I feel like today was one of the days I learned the most because I helped out a lot in Van 2 to get some soundings, look at rotation, find the best areas to target, and look for building storms. At one point we were able to locate a hook both visually and on the radar which saved us from passing it up.
As we chased this newly developing cell, we noticed some more mammatus clouds and what looked like a huge mesocyclone trying to form. It kept getting darker and the lightning was intensifying. We stopped a few times along the way to take pictures and none of us could leave too far from the van because of the amount of lightning going on just a little ways away. Once we did get out of the van though we were all bombarded with dust and pebbles flying at us in about 30 knot gusts because the gust front was moving in and moving in quickly!
We were getting nervous that this thing wouldn't drop something until dark because it was getting darker by the second and the storm was intensifying but wouldn't drop a tornado. We finally pulled off for good on a deserted dirt road (not usually wise by the way but there wasn't any rain nearby) and watched the storm for about an hour as the sun went completely down. It became pitch black and we watched the amazing lightning show. Today was a good day :)
We're now in Grand Junction, NE for the night and it looks like our best options for storms for tomorrow will be close by. I guess we'll see! Hope for the best, we're getting closer!
Good night!
GREAT! GREAT! GREAT! PICTURES!!!
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