2012-05-23: REPORTS: NE

[Bill Hark]

May 23 was a fun but tiring storm chase. There was thepotential for severe storms along an approaching front in Nebraska. There wasdecent upper level support but I was concerned about moisture limitations andcap. With some disagreement among the forecast models, I decided to “split thedifference” and wait for storm initiation in Grand Island, Nebraska. Thanks toblowing off mushy storms the previous day and doing some forecasting, I wasable to spend the night in Kearney and had a very short drive to my initialtarget area. I was expected initiation either near Red Cloud or near Sutton. I waitedat an Arbys on the south side of Grand Island and watched a slowly developingCu field. Eventually, storms initiated just to my east just north of I-80. I headed east on I-80. The first storms wereforming a line and moving northward. I couldn’t catch them but there was moreisolated development just south of the interstate. This was initiallyhigh-based and I was concerned they would be undercut by the front. I followedone developing storm north to Seward but there was a larger and slightly moreisolated storm to the south. The bases lowered. I waited on the north side oftown. I followed the rapidly developingstorm just north of the town of Seward. The storm had an interesting weakly tonon-rotating wall cloud that crossed the road to my north at 6:52 PM. Iheaded east on Cemetery Road which soon became gravel. The storm was to mynorth and continued to have a weakly rotating wall cloud. It becametornado-warned. I was blasted with large clouds of dust. I followed the stormnorthward in a stair-step approach but was having difficulty keeping up withit. At times, there appeared to be afunnel but there was not much rotation. I was further delayed by getting lostin the town of Valparaiso. The storm was moving to my northeast. At 7:43, itshowed a sudden increase in electrical activity. I could see a distantlowering/wall cloud but no tornado. Near Mead, the storm was dying. I ended thechase and headed to Gretna (near Omaha) for the night at a Super 8. I did brieflystop to take some lightning pictures.

ThreatNet image at 6:35 PM
http://www.harkphoto.com/052312radarimage635pm.jpg


This non-rotating lowering crossed 15 at 6:52 PM
http://www.harkphoto.com/052312nonrotatingprojection.jpg


Blowing dust
http://www.harkphoto.com/052312blowingdustwall_2276.jpg


Blowing dust
http://www.harkphoto.com/052312blowingdustlater.jpg


This looked like a tornado or funnel but I could see much rotation
http://www.harkphoto.com/052312falsetornado.jpg


Lightning from near Gretna
http://www.harkphoto.com/052312lightning.jpg


Bill Hark

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Man...I can't believe Andy did this type of chasing year round. From Amarillo-central NM-northern ND-Sioux City, IA. Exhausting to say the least! And this week isn't even done yet.

After staying the night in Jamestown, ND...we got up early and made the day long trip south along I-29 towards Sioux City, IA. I was favoring the northwest Iowa region today. The dynamics looked the same as Nebraska, but the LCLs were forecasted to be lower. After stoping in Missouri Valley, IA for food and gas, the first storms were firing west of us. We blasted west and north on highway 75 to parallel the storm. We got past Tekamah and stopped to observe a rotating wall cloud to our northeast.

We contiinued north to Decatur and flew east to stay ahead of the core. We definitely were threading the needle. We were driving 55mph in the rain and still had the rain pelting the rear window pretty hard. We prevailed through the core and came out the other side of the precip near Soldier, IA. we had a ragged wall cloud to our southeast with dust kicking up underneath it. I'm hesitant to call it a tornado or maybe some inflow. The wall cloud was definitely rotating though. I'll prost a video up and let the audience decide. But all was not lost. We turned north on HWY 183 towards Ute when we saw a rapidly rotating wall cloud to our northeast. The wall cloud was sucking up some serious dirt action from the north side of it and the dirt spiraled upwards into it.

Its safe to say from our vantage point, we definitely had a tornado. As we approached from the southwest, we were getting blasted hard with RFD. We kept on with HWY 183 to Ute, and noted a lot of tree damage in town, which was caused by the RFD I'm guessing. We followed the storm but bailed as it looked outflow dominant near Dennison, IA. We drove southeast to try and intercept the storm coming into Omaha, but it crapped out when we arrived. So we headed to downtown Omaha to eat at Spaghetti Works with Chris Rice and Randy Cooper. Shoutout going to Chris for kindly letting us stay the night at his place. After being on the road for the past 3 days, it was really nice.

 

[Skip Talbot]

Caleb Elliott, Phil Bates, and I went up for another aerial chase across eastern Nebraska. We decided to head back to home base after chasing North Dakota the day before, catching what we could on the way back to KC. We departed Minot in the morning and stopped for fuel in Sioux Falls and Omaha. We crossed the cold front between Sioux Falls and Omaha as high based convection was going up. The turbulence got rather severe at that point and we got knocked around hard for awhile. My laptop came up off the seat a few inches at one point, and I was so green I was pretty much useless by the time we landed in Omaha. Caleb did a fantastic job on the landing with a 25 knot wind gusting to 35 and a major crosswind component. Storms went up 50 to our west and we waited for something more discrete and better organized on the cold front before we made a move. After 6 or so a cell coming up out of southern Nebraska looked to be a bit ahead of the cold front and gust front from the previous storms with a nice inflow notch so we took off out of Omaha with the anvil already stretching overhead. The storm picked up a tornado warning and we were greeted by a ragged wall cloud as we approached. We did circles in front of the storm for about an hour until it completely fell apart, but we noted some great wall cloud structure with gustnadoes and outflow plumes underneath. We couldn't get terribly close to the wall because at about 5 miles or so we'd hit one of the storm's previous gust fronts and the plane would get bounced around so badly we couldn't hold our cameras straight. We might have been able to push through the gust front to more stable air on the other side, but we could see more outflow boundaries/gust fronts pushing out from the storm behind that one, so we decided to play it safe in the more stable air east of the storm. When the wall cloud became a detached arcus, we called it and turned south for Olathe, KS. The southerly winds made for a strong headwind though so we didn't fare much better time wise than if we had driven. I wasn't expecting a tornado on this chase given the dewpoint spreads, undercutting from adjacent storms and the cold front, and lack of helicity on the cold front, but we were stilll able to pull out some awesome wall cloud shots from the air, better structure than I expected out of the day. We're sitting out today's Wisconsin chase as storms look to be low, grungy and less than ideal for maintaining VFR while flying around them. We need a break most of all, however. Chasing in an airplane is actually a lot of grueling work and everyone needs a day off to rest after being couped up for many hours and getting knocked around in turbulence. We'll hit the triple point on Friday though.

Prepping the plane for the day's flying in Minot, ND:

Overflying some low clouds behind the cold front coming into Sioux Falls, SD:

Tornado warned west of Omaha:

Gustnado ahead of the wall:

Outflow plume:

Nicely shaped scud funnel:

 

[Andy Jackson]

After getting in position around Seward, NE I ended up on the tail end storm around David City. After thinking this was a busted chase day for me I planned on heading home. Around Valley the line of storms seemed to have taken on more substance so I decided to check the radar and there was a nice cell on radar right around where I first started earlier in the day. So I made the trek south and got to enjoy the supercell for at least a little while.
Here's another view of the storm:

 

[Ryan Pfeifer]

I meant to pay attention and head west of Omaha if any good cells got going, but I forgot and didn't see the tornado warned cell until it was almost to town. The wall cloud was dissipating when I got to it and cone shaped. Then the RFD picked up a bunch of dust and it got wrapped into the inflow and circulated around the wall cloud. It was the most tornado looking non-tornado I've ever seen. This occurred probably right about when it was entering Douglas County.

 

[Laura Duchesne]

Fred Plowman and I Left Louisurg, KS around noon and targeted south east Nebraska. We had doubts there would be anything at all given the large dewpoint and temperature spreads combined with strong capping. We watched tcu start to go up only for it to fizzle out. Was very close to throwing in the towel and heading back to KS, when we noticed a tail end charlie storm just north of I-80 near Seward and decided to go for it. We saw marginal elevated supercell struture and watched a gustnado cross the road right in front of us. Other than that, the storm was not really that exciting.

 

[Skip Talbot]

Finally got a detailed write up with pictures, video, stats, and map for this chase. This was my second aerial chase with videographer Phil Bates and pilot Caleb Elliott, and despite low expectations from a cold front play, we got better wall cloud and outflow plume structure than our first aerial chase up in North Dakota the day before. Here's a link to the log:

http://skip.cc/chase/120523/