Storm Chasing Wrap-up

Our last couple days of storm chasing were pretty interesting. Back on Saturday we left Grand Island, Nebraska fairly early and headed west toward the panhandle, as it seemed like storms were going to initiate rather early. We made it to Bridgeport in time to deploy and take a look at an approaching supercell thunderstorm. It didn’t have a great structure, but at least it was a supercell. That storm even had a tornado warning issued for it, which puzzled us somewhat since it didn’t seem like that great a supercell, but we figure the warning was issued because the Nat’l Weather Service radar in Cheyenne was down and they probably just wanted to play it safe. After the DOW scanned for a little while we made a loop around Bridgeport and then decided to try to head south through Kimball and Sidney and intercept a storm northeast of Denver that was looking interesting. Unfortunately it broke apart into several small, junky cells, so when we crossed the Colorado border south of Sidney we called it a day (at 4pm, rather early in the day, but all the multicell/line storms had sucked up almost all the CAPE), with Paul and Herb setting up for some time-lapse photography of some growing cumulus towers to our west. After a little bit we packed up and went down to Sterling, Colorado to stay for the night. Our early end to the evening allowed us the chance to grab a non-fast food meal finally, although it was Country Kitchen with $13 pitchers. Boo that. But the group phone call to Frame out in the parking lot was rather entertaining. 🙂
The target area on Sunday was in the same NE Colorado / Nebraska panhandle area, so we just hung around the motel in Sterling until 4pm waiting for something to initiate in the region. Finally a couple storms started popping, so we took off northwest toward Scottsbluff, Nebraska, in the far western Nebraska panhandle. When we were still about half an hour away Josh informed us from the DOW that the storm, which at that point was on the Nebraska-Wyoming border, was developing a hook echo, so I was worried we were gonna miss the best stage of the storm. Fortunately for us the supercell kept strengthening and became very photogenic. Paul, Mario & I stopped at four or five different places over a distance of about 15-20 miles on a highway heading south from Scottsbluff, keeping the heart of the storm to our due west for about three hours or so, so we could take a bunch of pictures of it and just soak it all in. (For a radar loop of the storm, click here, and look for the storm that develops just to the west of BFF.) A couple of the places we stopped in particular were quite windy, with an inflow sustained at 35-40 knots at our backs. The sound of the wind howling over the open Plains was rather strange and almost a bit eerie, I must say. It was sure whipping up the tumbleweed too, which definitely seemed to have a magnetic-like attraction to me. But the supercell had a very striking structure visually, with a lowered “mothership” base, and even dropped a couple possible funnel clouds, but no tornadoes that we were aware of. Fortunately we also managed to avoid the hail as well, as we heard from a passerby that roads near the town of Lyman (west of Scottsbluff, on the Wyoming border) were covered to a depth of four inches in hail! (We later found that the SPC had reports of 1.75″ diameter hail in that area.) It was a beautiful storm, certainly the best one I’ve ever seen, and it was also the best storm that the folks from ROTATE had seen all season so far, so we were quite pleased to have been along with them for that. In addition to the occasional sheriff or other random curious passerby, we also ran into some military personnel along the way, as the last location at which the DOW was parked and scanning was basically on the doorstep of an Air Force Missile Command outpost that housed a nuclear missile silo, which brought a couple of armed 18-year old soldiers down the hill to check out what we were doing, hehe.

The storm on Sunday was the last hurrah for us on our storm chasing trip, as the forecast for Monday was absolutely terrible (i.e., sunny and calm, with no chance for convective storms really anywhere in the Midwest), so when the DOW and the rest of ROTATE headed off to Boulder for the night and declared a down day for Monday, we began our long trek back from Kimball, Nebraska, which involved some really tricky directions to get back to Penn State (east on Interstate 80 for 1500 miles, south on US 220 for about 10 miles), and made it back to North Platte before we called it a night. On Monday Mario & I dropped Paul off at the Omaha airport so he could fly to NYC, and we managed to get to Elkhart, Indiana before we had to call it quits for the day, which enabled us to get back to State College a little after 6pm Tuesday. So much driving… I was really glad to be back in my own bed for the first time in a week though, I must say.
The storm chasing trip was really quite valuable, I thought. Even though we didn’t see a tornado, we got a taste of just about everything else in the four days we were chasing. We experienced a clear-air bust on Thursday, some junk multicell storms on Friday after waiting for hours at a gas station for something to develop, a long drive to a tornado-warned supercell and an early-quitting day on Saturday, waiting around at a motel until mid-afternoon and finally seeing a very nice supercell on Sunday. Oh yeah, and lots of fast food. Fortunately we didn’t have to have any Texaco dinners along the way, I was really glad about that. 🙂 I also learned quite a bit, about how chasers use the various weather prediction models to figure out where storms are most likely to form and move, and then to get explanations of the structure of a thunderstorm when you’re actually there and can see and feel it all, rather than just reading about it in a textbook. That, and the ROTATE guys were an awesome group to hang out with and get to know a little bit. I’d absolutely love to go chasing again sometime, and I feel like I’d be able to get even more out of the next time I go. Maybe we PSU Meteo grad students will be able to organize a storm chasing vacation next spring out to the Great Plains, that’d be so awesome!