Memorial Day was the second day of my FIRST chase with my 10 year old daughter.
AND SHE'S HOOKED!!
I've chased for 15 years and once she was old enough, I would show some of my pics/videos. But she was always scared of thunder
![Wink ;) ;)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Suddenly this spring, she started asking more questions and would always want to know if a big storm was coming when it was supposed to rain here, because she wanted to see one.
I was planning on chasing both Sunday and Monday and now that school is done and the Sunday chase looked to be a close one, I asked her if she wanted to come with and she eagerly said yes!
I'm going to throw in a bit on Sunday before I get to Monday, rather than starting a separate 5/29 reports thread if that's okay.
We left Omaha mid afternoon 5/29 and went to the Norfolk area to wait for storms. I was worried this would be a big bust and on her first day.
Even though it was much further west, we made a break for the storms that were forming. We arrived shortly after 8 to the storm west of Taylor. She was so excited to see a big, mean looking supercell! We watched it for a bit as it moved away to the northeast and had to backtrack due to the poor road network. We caught back up with it as it crossed the highway north of Taylor, initially only driving right up to the storm to avoid the hail.
Once it crossed the highway, I immediately began looking for big hail in the ditches and not more than a couple miles ahead saw the first stones. I pulled over and hopped out of the car to my daughter asking, "what are you doing? You're going to get wet!!"
I ended up finding multiple 2+" stones and one that was 4.5". This was the largest hail I've ever seen in person. We took some pics and headed on again having to drop back south to be able to go north again and try to catch back up with the cell. All the while my daughter was recording video to use for her "vlog" she wants to do on my chases.
![Stick Out Tongue :p :p](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
We made it to Yankton, SD where my parents live to crash there for the night before the chase on Memorial Day. We arrived just ahead of the storms approaching and within 30 minutes, Yankton was under a tornado warning. I woke my parents up and we all hung out in the basement while the storm passed with no touchdown thankfully.
We left Monday morning and headed north to Brookings. Storms were already forming into a big mess to our west, but were beginning to show some areas of rotation along the leading edge. We went west of the town of Volga and waited for the storms to approach as we were now under a tornado warning. I counted 3-4 small couplets on the leading edge and one of them was approaching our location. There was an extremely "violent" roll cloud that came over us, and to our south a few miles you could see a nice lowering. Soon a nice funnel dropped down for about 20-30 seconds, but immediately lifted back up.
At this point we headed east into Minnesota as a nice looking storm on radar was out ahead of the line a bit. We got ahead of this storm, but it was soon absorbed by the main line. Upon stopping in front of the storms, the air was cold (~58 degrees) and there was strong outflow. I was almost ready to call off the chase.
I decided to give it a bit more time though and we continued east ahead of the line. In my rearview mirror it began to look better with a nice shelf cloud on the leading edge of pretty green core.
I decided to stop again and at least get some pics of my daughter in front of the storm as my wife wanted me to take lots of pictures. Upon stepping out of the car, I was much more enthused. It was warm and muggy with decent inflow into the line that still just to our west. We observed an area of concentrated rapid rotation on the leading edge just to our southwest.
The line was almost on us within a couple of minutes so we hopped back in the car and started heading east down the highway. We were going 70 mph and were barely getting ahead of the leading edge of the storms. As we were driving, I was looking out the windshield directly above us to watch all the chaotic motion of the leading edge. I soon noticed an area that was rotating pretty good and sure enough started to see a nipple funnel start to form about the time it disappeared from view over the car.
Suddenly, the inflow winds increase dramatically out of the southeast and rain curtains were flying across the road and fields. Up ahead a short distance was a grove of trees and we observed a rather large section of one of the trees go toppling over in the winds. I realized we were directly in front of a developing tornado!
As we passed the grove of trees you could see multiple branches down in the road. The strong inflow winds continued and I didn't want to stop too soon and was unable to see much behind me for any kind of ground contact.
A short time later, my daughter commented that it felt like her ears had to pop, which of course is a common sign of a tornado passing very close. I told her what that meant and she was like "woah!"
A new tornado warning came out shortly thereafter as the line raced northeast at 65-75 mph. We decided to drop southeast to get in front of one last area of storms that were just ahead of the main line, but nothing much was happening with those, so we started heading about 530p arriving in Omaha just before 10p.
She was quite the trooper as we put on almost 1000 miles over 2 days. Even though both days (especially Monday) "underperformed", I fee like we got the most out of our chase. Everything was a first for her of course, and for me I had never seen that large of hail before, and never had a tornado forming that close to me either.
I put together a short video from Monday's highlights:
![storm.jpeg storm.jpeg](https://stormtrack.org/data/attachments/39/39780-a60bb154478888cbf61ea54098ef4af3.jpg)
![2.5 hail.jpeg 2.5 hail.jpeg](https://stormtrack.org/data/attachments/39/39781-af7a5b1e30a9e2fcc3a5c1b6334dd502.jpg)
![4.5 hail.jpeg 4.5 hail.jpeg](https://stormtrack.org/data/attachments/39/39782-b3bad6eb885a30e5eb20bee0756e55e4.jpg)
![Paige.jpeg Paige.jpeg](https://stormtrack.org/data/attachments/39/39783-63d7ad3c5799c608dedf24657fb2ee31.jpg)