Long story short, no wedge tornado, but there were multiple tornadoes throughout the storm's life cycle, including over Louisville and later on to the east of the town.
Here's my account in chronological order with times, to help other chasers. If anyone has any accounts with exact times, to the nearest minute, please chime in.
I started the day around Lincoln and slowly drifted east. Storms in northeastern Nebraska started to rotate fairly quickly, but I was holding off for more discrete activity, either down the cold front or along an outflow boundary in the warm sector. Once a few cells started to develop southwest of Omaha, I zeroed in.
The chase sort of went from 0-60. I dropped south near South Bend and noticed a lowering cloud base that was beginning to rotate. What captured my attention from the start was how low the clouds were and that will be a common theme throughout this account. At first, the rotating cloud couldn't have been more than 100 feet wide and it wasn't a funnel cloud, but I don't think it was a true wall cloud either. I followed this feature a little bit west and the following photo shows that it looked like at 5:22 p.m. The feature was originally horizontal, but it was tilted at this point.
Just moments later, the feature consolidated into a growing, low-hanging wall cloud. I found a spot to set up and was prepared to broadcast live via Periscope on Twitter, but due to issues linking to Twitter, it was the only real broadcast I attempted. I did not want to waste too much time trying to fix something that could distract me from the chase.
This short video begins at 5:28 p.m. and was shot 3 miles northwest of Louisville, looking SSE. I'm usually not this animated during a chase, but it appeared as if I was finally going to see a tornado this year. The video is inconclusive, but shows a very low wall cloud (base lower than 200 meters) and some wispy scud rising into the cloud. A small, wispy tornado was observed by multiple chasers over Louisville, but I believe that happened a few minutes after this video.
Please excuse the quality. It does not look that bad on my phone, but there's some sort of issue with either converting the file or uploading it to YouTube. It wasn't HD, but it's a lot less muddy than what's shown.
Here's a direct link to the Periscope broadcast, which appears to be somewhat better quality:
https://www.pscp.tv/stormchaserQ/1yoJMVRVoNlxQ
The next 20 minutes was spent driving through downtown Louisville, dodging debris and racing east to get out of the residential area. As a result, the growing wall cloud was not clearly visible, so it's likely that I missed seeing a tornado due to structural and terrain obstructions. At 5:49 p.m., I reported a "wedge-shaped wall cloud, base <200m, rotating. Wind damage in area." This was 1 mile east of Louisville.
The first decent photo I captured of the storm at this stage was at 5:59 p.m., 3 miles east of Louisville:
The low wall cloud is clearly visible, with inflow to the east. It was also around this time that the mesocyclone started turning right, so in anticipation, I dropped south and east. I did not want to be directly under the mesocyclone in case the whole thing dropped.
The next photo comes in at 6:06 p.m. and isn't all that different from the previous photo, except that it's not a panoramic. It shows the low, rotating wall cloud just to the north.
The terrain for the rest of the chase was increasingly hilly, causing terrain to block a clear view of the wall cloud and any brief spinups that a few chasers reported. At 6:25 p.m., I reported "very close to wedging out... 4 ESE Louisville, NE." The large wall cloud was probably near its lowest point, as it looked as if it was only 100 meters, or so, above the ground. As I was driving, I was focusing on the road ahead, so I let my rooftop video camera take in the footage. At no point was there a wedge tornado. It was simply terrain playing tricks on eyes. As low as the wall cloud was, through confirmation from numerous chasers, the storm did not "wedge out." Interestingly enough, at the exact same time and location that I made the 6:25 p.m. report, SPC had an LSR reading "large wedge." It seems like several chasers had erroneously reported this.
Anyway, here's a video that runs from approximately 6:18 to 6:36 p.m. Unfortunately, terrain obstructs view of the system during it's "wedgiest" state. I sped the video up to 16x the actual speed to condense this portion of the chase:
The final photo that I'll share is from 6:35 p.m. and it shows the striated mesocyclone, just minutes before the storm was absorbed by convection along a cold front to the immediate west.
I shifted south to (barely) stay ahead of the strong outflow winds the evolving convective system was producing. I thought that I might catch a discrete storm on the southern flank of the system, but I made it into northeastern Kansas before I called the chase off. A few cells around sunset showed brief rotation, but nothing from my vantage point looked like anything else besides a shelf cloud.
Overall, I found the chase to be exciting, as it featured what was probably the closest thing I've seen to a tornadic supercell this year. It did produce multiple, brief tornadoes, even if I did not conclusively see any of them. Despite that, it displayed one of the lowest wall clouds I have ever encountered and the storm structure was very photogenic.
