Sunday, June 11, 2006

Hurrah, a real storm!

Finally, a good supercell. We began the day in Lincoln at Ken Dewey's house. I realized that we would have to get into the target early, because of the potential of storms becoming quickly outflow dominant due to the problem that has plagued us all season, an extreme lack of moisture.

Therefore we blasted west early on met up with Jim L and crew in GRI, and arrived in Ogalalla about 2 PM MDT, where John and Beth Moore joined the caravan.. We hooked into some wifi to check data- and discovered that there was a good supercell near Scottsbluff. As we got on the road, the radar showed that the first storm had a new cell developing on its east side, so we drove north of Oshkosh on the road to the Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge to intercept. About 10 miles north of town a nicely structured but high based storm came into view. While we were still driving we viewed a nice laminar funnel that looked promising, but it croaked by the time we found a good viewing spot. After this point the storm never looked close to tornadoing, but as we watched it develop over the open prairies it became quite a sight. After a half hour or so, it began to approach too closely, so we drove south and east to keep out in front of the cell for the next couple of hours, stopping periodically to view the nice structure and numerous pretty decent gustnadoes. We continued to stay ahead of the storm along I-80 to a point near Sutherland where the HP/shelf structure became very impressive again. However, after a few minutes the storm went downhill fast, so we called it a chase and went back to our motel in OGA.

This was by far our best chase day this season..an extremely enjoyable second to last day of the vacation.
Photos here

1 comment:

the weatherman said...

Those were great wild clouds..Very attractive to look at..That kind of wall cloud rotating is perhaps accompanied with severe thunderstorm..Great photos!