Started the day in North Platte and set a somewhat vague target of Norfolk, Nebraska. Passed through Broken Bow specifically to eat at the Kincaider brewpub, which is awesome and in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road. Couldn't believe I had the opportunity to take my son to yet another of my favorite spots on his first chase vacation!
One of the themes of Storm Chase 2022 was high gas prices, and today was the first time I broke $100. Admittedly, our rented Chevy Suburban had a large tank that was close to empty, but still an unfortunate milestone...
Once in Norfolk, I communicated with a chaser friend from my local area (Philadelphia) and learned there was a large chaser convergence in Osmond, about 30 miles to the NNW. I started backtracking west from Norfolk, because I thought I was too far east of the front. But somewhere west of Pierce, I felt a north wind, so I went back east again to Pierce, where my friend and I made plans to meet.
By this time, it was already after 7pm, it had been cloudy all day, but SPC held to the severe threat and put up a tornado watch - I think this was actually our first tornado watch since arriving on the Plains over a week ago, on Saturday, May 21. We were in the northeast quadrant of the watch box, and some storms finally started going up in the southwest quadrant, all the way back near Broken Bow, where we had been hours earlier! Given the time, we knew this would be the only play before dark. It took all of our remaining daylight to catch up to the storm, after a two and a half hour drive... Due to the poor road network, we could not continue going west, without dropping more south than we had to and then going west again.
The silhouetted supercell and back sheared anvil provided nice visuals as we approached in the waning light.
At Burwell, we turned north. The storm had a TOR warning at this point.
The base came into view briefly, right before dark, about 9:15 CDT. Lots of chasers were along this road heading north from Burwell. It was hilly and hard to find a good vantage point. There was very little light. As a result, we never saw much of any defined structure... There may have been some laminar nature to the updraft base, but by this point it looked kind of stretched out.
Unfortunately, we had to drive all the way down to Hastings; I had already booked a room there, fearing it would be hard to find rooms with chasers and Memorial Day weekend travelers. It was midnight when we pulled in, so there would be no dinner tonight... Long day!
