2011-06-26 REPORTS: SD

[dmckemy]

The SPC had a 15% hashed (moderate risk) for tornadoes for the eastern part of the state this day, and while I was tempted to take off and head east, I was a little wary that the cloud cover and convection that was firing off in the central part of South Dakota and Nebraska could have an effect on storm initiation in the moderate risk area. I decided to hang around the western part of South Dakota to see if anything good would fire off since instability and wind shear were still expected to be decent in this part of the state. By mid-afternoon, several storms fired off or near the Black Hills and I positioned myself east of the Hills to catch the storms. While most of the storms weren't long lived, there was one particular supercell that fired off of the Black Hills and made it's way right at me. At that time, I was just outside of the Badlands... when I saw the radar frame of the storm, I went a couple miles west to get myself a decent view of it. The storm (photo below) already had wall cloud with it, though from my distance away from the storm I could not tell if it was rotating (radar indicated decent rotation, though).

The storm developed a nice hook on radar, and had good rotation too. Unfortunately, road options in the badlands make it difficult to chase, and I actually ended up behind the storm for quite some time before finally hopping on the interstate to get ahead of it.

By the time I finally got myself in a good position to watch it again, it started to become outflow dominant and weakened. Still, the storm made for a nice local chase and had some great structure with it!

 

[Chris Allington]

Sat for most of the day near Hebron, waiting on initiation. Around 6pm our cu disappeared and we figured our only option was the unorganized squall line pushing into Eastern Nebraska. The fog in front of the storm made it impossible to even see the shelf into you were in the whales mouth, but we punched through the storms in hope of a mammatus display... we certainly weren't disappointed!