My chase partner and I chased in south central Nebraska and were able to enjoy a couple of amazing storms visually, but unfortunately missed the earlier tornadoes.
We left Omaha unsure of an exact target as the CAM's were a little inconsistent on where to go and the target area was a pretty wide area along a very slow moving cold front draped from northwest Iowa back to the southwest across Nebraska into northwest Kansas.
We initially chose Columbus, NE. Once there, there were storms that had formed to out southwest south of Lexington. This was further southwest than we thought we would need to go, but since this was about an hour and 1/2 away and the storms would be heading in our general direction we decided to head for those storms.
There was an initial east/west line of storms that eventually split into 2 dominant supercells, each had a tornado warning at some point with the furthest east storm becoming the more dominant storm near Axtell, NE.
We watched as a couple of confirmed tornado reports came in as we were still driving towards the target. Storm continued to look amazing on radar as we approached near Minden. Once we could see the base though, there was no tornado on the ground.
We stayed with the storm as it moved east and for a while was a little disorganized. However, it soon wrapped up with a very strong area of rotation. As we stopped within the hook of the storm, at one point a bowl funnel formed and very strong RFD could be seen wrapping around kicking up dirt in the fields below. The dust was being sucked up into the base of the storm and we thought for sure the storm would drop a tornado, but it never did. Shortly thereafter, a new cell formed to the southeast and choked off the storm.
We hopped out in front of this new storm which at times had great structure, but never was close tornado wise. This storm eventually died out as well, but not before we had almost 3.5 hours of chasing these 2 storms.
We left Omaha unsure of an exact target as the CAM's were a little inconsistent on where to go and the target area was a pretty wide area along a very slow moving cold front draped from northwest Iowa back to the southwest across Nebraska into northwest Kansas.
We initially chose Columbus, NE. Once there, there were storms that had formed to out southwest south of Lexington. This was further southwest than we thought we would need to go, but since this was about an hour and 1/2 away and the storms would be heading in our general direction we decided to head for those storms.
There was an initial east/west line of storms that eventually split into 2 dominant supercells, each had a tornado warning at some point with the furthest east storm becoming the more dominant storm near Axtell, NE.
We watched as a couple of confirmed tornado reports came in as we were still driving towards the target. Storm continued to look amazing on radar as we approached near Minden. Once we could see the base though, there was no tornado on the ground.
We stayed with the storm as it moved east and for a while was a little disorganized. However, it soon wrapped up with a very strong area of rotation. As we stopped within the hook of the storm, at one point a bowl funnel formed and very strong RFD could be seen wrapping around kicking up dirt in the fields below. The dust was being sucked up into the base of the storm and we thought for sure the storm would drop a tornado, but it never did. Shortly thereafter, a new cell formed to the southeast and choked off the storm.
We hopped out in front of this new storm which at times had great structure, but never was close tornado wise. This storm eventually died out as well, but not before we had almost 3.5 hours of chasing these 2 storms.
