9/21/08 REPORTS: CO, NE

[Dann Cianca]

Targetted Wray, Colorado but quickly changed gears as cloudcover inhibited heating. There seemed to be a little convergence along the Palmer Divide to my south and the Cheyenne Ridge to the north. I was joined by Jonathan Splitt and Jeff Auger (first-time chasers). We decided to head up I-76 and then north into the Nebraska panhandle to intercept the only game in town. A nice severe-warned supercell that put some decent hail down in Scottsbluff began to right-move and we had a good bead on it. It was a gorgeous storm but unfortunately as we approached, it returned to the mean flow and died out.

After a brief foray into the sand hills, we decided to head back to Denver. I had mused earlier that it would be awesome to have some lightning to shoot on the way home, but honestly didn't expect much. We stopped in Sidney for some dinner and when we came out, we had lightning in three different directions. None of them were severe storms, but the CG output was impressive.

Over the next two and a half hours, we stopped at three separate locations between Sidney, Nebraska and Sterling, Colorado and shot lightning. I got 60+ shots during that time frame, though I was messing around too much with my camera settings and some of them turned out bad. Jeff didn't think to bring a camera, but was getting CG's with his cell phone. It was an amazing show!

Here are a few selections:

Hooray for September storms!

 

[Carey Walton]

I also chased this lone supercell that reportedly produced some golfball hail. It looked good when it turned right, but died shortly thereafter.

Looking northeast, there seems to be a pretty nice storm up in South Dakota, but it soon started to fall apart also as the sun set.

The real treat came on the way home with a couple stops near Julesburg, CO to shoot lightning.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

http://www.extremeinstability.com/08-9-21.htm

33 pictures on there. I'd post some in here if ST would up their stupidly small size restrictions a little(are there people out there with monitor widths set to less than 800 pixels?....I bet not....so that would seem like a better max width....unless I'm missing something).

Chased the same storm. It did look decent right when it turned right. I tried one gravel road, and soon got the hell off of it. If only it had better dews to work with during that right turn. Also, if only that stupid updraft on its sw side didn't pop up and slam into it. You could see that is what took it off its rightward turn.

Thank god for the odd window in the bathroom of my motel. Shadeless, but slightly textured glass. Opening that to look out it is the only reason I knew there was lightning in the area. I'm 99% certain had it not been that way, I'd have just went to sleep and never know about any lightning. Local thunder was never that loud to wake a person up, or frequent enough.