Day 17 of the Great Storm Chase!

Yo yo, so today we had a day let me tell you. We started off in Omaha, NE of course and we decided to to head south towards Topeka, KS to start off our day. We got there and had lunch at Wendy's and checked out some more soundings, indices, dew point temps, surface temps, maps, etc. to see where we should go and when things would fire up.

We, of course, ended up sitting around Wendy's for about 2 hours waiting on these storms to fire. We had the best location for when things actually would fire up since we could relocate to any general area, so we just had to wait and see where it would happen. We had amazing indices! There was almost a 4000 CAPE, -8 LI, decent CIN--although a little high, 84 Fahrenheit temp, 68 Fahrenheit dew, and not much cloud cover. Everything was perfect for supercells; we just needed a trigger to fire these storms. We were originally relying on the dryline to move in and get these storms to fire up in Topeka but we then realized that a deep, immature storm was starting to form northwest of us somewhat near Falls City, NE--but still in northern Kansas.

We grabbed our computers and ran to the vans to quickly gas up and hit the road to intercept this promising cell. We shot up north as fast as possible and we had Korey as navigator, Dan and Stephen on radar, and me and Brad as spotters. I also helped to figure out some road networks in the area and to help Korey in making sure roads were paved and all that. We were heading to the storm when one cell fired south of it and it was a better play than the original one we were looking at. By this time, the northern storm was more mature, had a slight hook, great shear, and a meso marker. We figured it would drop a tornado soon but we would have to go through the southern cell to get to it. Therefore, we decided to make a play on the supercell to the south since it was easier to get to and it was rapidly growing.

These cells were cruising though! They were moving at about 24 mph or so, so we had to book it in order to get ahead of it. We got to a decent location to intercept this storm when we also started running into A LOT of other chasers in the area. We stopped at a somewhat flat area to watch a shelf and wall cloud rotate to see if it would drop a tornado. We watched it for a little while and then saw that the rotation was slowing down and that the northern cell was getting better. After a few minutes of discussion, we decided to jut over to the northern cell. One of the biggest issue of this chase was the terrain. There were a lot of hills and a lot of trees that obstructed our view.



While we were passing the time at this cell, though, a few of us were talking about the "Bear Cage" of the supercell. I brought up the idea of bears actually coming from the Bear Cage and how absurd it would be if storms dropped every kind of bear from the sky instead of hail. Then someone brought up, what if storms dropped bears instead of tornadoes. Then we acted out what would happen and said that the bears would come spinning down from the sky and they'd be angry and hungry. It would be so much more dangerous to chase storms that dropped bears of every kind from the sky instead of tornadoes...we had nothing better to do, haha.

We ran into even more chasers as we went after this northern cell and we even saw the chasers that we ran into yesterday as well as the new TIV and Vortex 2. En route, we saw a town that got hammered by the storm. There were leaves and small branches all over the place from the wind. We even saw massive amounts of hail in neighboring fields, so one of our vans stopped to collect some of the hail stones. They were 4.25 inches--softball-sized hail! Also, we saw a lot of pods with anemometers and all kinds of instruments that were set along the roads, probably by Vortex 2 or someone else doing research. That was pretty cool to see.

We got to a great location where there were about 4 meso markers and we stopped and watched this storm as well. This is the point when everything started to get crazy. There were over 100 chasers lining the road, it was absolutely dangerous! So many locals, professionals, and hobbyists were chasing these storms and a lot of them were driving and parking crazily, which made for hazardous conditions on top of hazardous weather.

We watched this one for just a little bit when we were finally able to find a spot to pull over. We looked for a little while and then noticed that the southern cell was picking up strength quickly, so we decided to get back to that one. The traffic was so horrible on the 2-lane road that we saw a small break in the cars and we jumped in the vans as fast as possible and took off down the road.

We were able to get to a part of the storm that was looking monstrous! We could see where the core was and it was pouring down rain very heavily in that area. We saw something that looked like a lowering cloud briefly inside of the heavy rain and once we couldn't see much at all in that area, we decided to pull off onto a nearby road instead of punching that area and risking getting hit by something that was hidden--a tornado. We waited there for about a minute or two and then decided to punch it and drive through it to get to a better part of the storm. We got hit by golf ball sized hail on the way through and a lot of rain. We got to another small road that was horribly littered with chasers as far as you could see! It was absolutely ridiculous!



We watched these storms for awhile and saw several mesocyclones and wall clouds but we never got to see a tornado. It was getting really dark by this time so we decided to book a hotel, since we hadn't yet and it was already 9 pm with a bazillion chasers in the area. I was able to book a decent hotel about 40 miles away, thankfully, so we stopped off at KFC on the way to our hotel.

We ended up chasing into Missouri today, so we ended up in Chillicothe, MO for the night. We got to our hotel at a decent time and unloaded our vans. Not too long after we got here, one of the guys ran in our room and said that there was a tornado on the ground really close to our hotel. We quickly turned on the local news to see what they were saying and sure enough, there was a tornado on the ground right next to where we just came from and were chasing. A few of us ran into my professor's room and we were looking at the radar, velocity data, VIL data, etc. We figured out that we could drive north on the neighboring road for about 15 minutes and would be able to intercept the storm easily. We then figured out that the storm's velocity was about 30 mph northeast and we calculated that it would take about an hour for that part of the storm to reach our interception point...no tornado would last that long. We then saw that a decent cell that was rapidly growing with decent sized hail just southwest of us and heading right for our hotel. I kept an eye on it for awhile but it started dissipating soon before it got to us and didn't exactly amount to anything.



We did find out that there was a tornado within the heavy amount of rain that was right next to us when we decided to stop after losing sight of the lowering cloud. We were there, but the tornado was rain-wrapped and it was impossible to see a thing...I don't consider it as anything really. It was great that we were in the right location but it doesn't do much if you can't see it.

Today was a great day and unfortunately the last. Tomorrow we're heading back to Indiana but there's a possibility that we'll chase our way back. There's some decent outlooks for severe storms in east-central Illinois, so we are thinking about trying to check those storms out on our way. The only problem would be that it's pretty likely, at least at this point, that those storms will squall out and will probably thus not give us a tornado.

We've seen everything there is to see with severe storms and supercells on this trip...everything BUT a tornado :( Today, we saw an amazing sunset and a very vivid rainbow--the best I've ever seen in my entire life! It was so bold and we even were able to see the end of it! Can you believe it! (No, there was no leprechauns or pots of gold)









I guess there's always a slight chance for tomorrow--so for one last time, hope for the best!

Good night!