A Big Show

Things started up late today, but once they did, the show was a good one. We spent the whole day in NE, heading from Alliance to just east of Broken Bow.

We were able to follow one storm for about 4 hours from about 6pm until after dark, seeing a supercell, funnel cloud, rainbows and lots of lightning. All afternoon we waited for convection to begin as a cap repressed early and mid afternoon storms. A stationary pseudo-warm front over central NE was the focus point for storm formation. A dryline coming in from the desert southwest would push into the area, interacting with a small shortwave of energy from a low pressure system over the Pacific. together these ingredients could spawn tornadoes and lots of severe thunderstorms. Indeed, once the storms got going, they did produce one short-lived tornado from the cell to our north.

When the chase began, we had to choose between two growing cells -- one to the north and one to the southeast. We chose the southeast one as it was better developed and it was all alone. In the end, there was no right answer as all the storms developed rapidly. Even though we missed a brief tornado, it would have been hard to see and there was a lot of rain and many cells to contend with to the north. The isolated storm we followed put down baseball sized hail and a funnel cloud. It was tornado warned, but there never was a tornado.

The cell we shased was a great storm as it was alone and moved slow enough that we could keep up with it. A couple of times it looked like it might drop a tornado, but it never did quite get its act toghether. The cell did wrap up to look like a spaceship by the end of the night. It was by the far the most picturesque storm of the trip. By the time darkness fell, lightning filled the sky, keep the storm lit almost constatnly. As night came on, all the storms merged into an MCS and dumped rain on east-central NE. We headed back to North Platte to bed down for the night.

In total, we traveled about 450 miles for the day all in NE, bringing our trip total to about 3,300 miles.

If we are lucky, we will get one last day of chasing in before heading back east.