Moville Magic

By virtue of staying last night in Norfolk, Nebraska, we had put ourselves relatively close to the main target area for today’s chasing, meaning that we didn’t roll out from the hotel until just after 1pm. We drove a couple hours to a small town in Iowa called Moville, about 15 miles east of Sioux City, where it was time to sit and wait in the 95-100 degree heat for a couple hours wondering where storms were going to initiate. Finally around 6pm there was a line of storms that developed from about Norfolk, Nebraska to around Yankton, South Dakota, so we made our way to Akron, Iowa, and crossed the border into South Dakota a wee bit. We were caught in a heavy downpour, but that really was about it, the storms weren’t organized all that well. But hey, raindrops today was major progress from yesterday’s severe lack of raindrops.
While we were waiting in Moville though, we did spy this lenticular cloud, which, needless to say, is quite rare for Iowa. Usually you need a mountain or something to set up a gravity wave that could cause a lenticular cloud, so we’re not actually totally sure what caused this. Maybe some of the convection that was starting up off to the west, who knows. It’s still quite interesting though.
I must say though, the several vehicles of Discovery Channel folks that are tagging along on the storm chasing expedition are, for the most part, completely clueless when it comes to simple things like reading a map. For instance, when we decided to roll out of Moville and go chasing, all the Discovery people were really slow in getting ready (they’ve been with the chasers for four weeks, you’d think they’d be used to the whole process by now), and as a result were well behind the vehicles with the actual scientists in it, DOW3, Scout, TIV and our car (“Lion”). So the initial destination town and every little turn had to be called out about ten times as each of the trailing Discovery vehicles came across each turn. I mean, is it really that hard to look at a map for two seconds, find where you are and then the only road that goes to the specified destination (which each Discovery vehicle also has to ask about over the radio multiple times of course…) relatively directly? And it’s also rather annoying when they all tell one of the chasers exactly what to say for the camera, even if it’s not totally accurate. They’re definitely not being like a fly on the wall and simply observing and filming what’s going on, they have a set storyline to fill and are desperately trying to get shots/dialogue that will go along with that, and are being rather intrusive in doing so. Well, I’ll end my rant, at least for the time being. At least they get the group, including us, motel rooms at a cheap bulk rate.
Anyway, we’re spending the night in Grand Island, Nebraska, which allows us to hedge our bets on whether we’ll head west to the Nebraska panhandle or eastern Colorado/Wyoming, or whether we’ll head south into Kansas or northern Oklahoma. At this point the western target is looking a little better, but we’ll see what the morning model runs bring.