Finally, a real supercell

Well, we finally had a pretty decent chase yesterday- we could have seen perhaps the best supercell of the day right near where we started out in McCook, as Jim Leonard and a few others saw a very nice storm in Chase county, NE later in the afternoon that almost produced a tornado, and had some spectacular mammatus at sunset. Still, I am not displeased with what we saw. We had been conversing with Mike Umscheid on the cell phone earlier, and he was convinced that eastern Colorado was the best place to be, and after looking at the data, I agreed. So we took off after a cell that had already developed near Ft Morgan, CO. As we approached Yuma, we could see the original cell to the north, and a new storm to the west near Otis. The radar showed that the southernmost storm was the storm to go after, and visually it looked like it was becoming a supercell. So we dropped south, as the storm was moving basically due south to the west of us. From then on we just stayed due west of the storm all the way down to I-70 near Flagler, where a new LPish updraft formed west of town. We followed this new storm down to near Kit Carson, where we decided to call it a chase.

The storms were not jaw-dropping structure wise, but given the extreme dearth of any real supercells for me this season, it was a very satisfying chase.

We did have incident at the motel this morning in Brush, CO. I stupidly left my CRV unlocked during the night, and a thief decided to do some ransacking of vehicles in the parking lot- he got our XM satellite radio, and a toolbox from the car next to us. No really big deal, but I will have to buy a new radio (not too expensive, I had the cheapest model).

06-06-06 ... it figures.



Photos from the chase here