6/14/14 Central Nebraska Moderate Risk Chase

          Another chase, another moderate risk in Nebraska! My string of higher risk chases continued again on this chase as another moderate risk was issued for most of central and eastern Nebraska. For this day, a triple point was forecasted to set up in central Nebraska where storms would fire along near a dryline, warmfront, and cool front intersection. I picked Grand Island as my initial target and headed west from Omaha early in the afternoon.
          I arrived around 4pm and waited at the big truck stop along I-80. There were many other chasers there and I milled around the big store inside waiting for initiation. Finally around 530, cumulus clouds began to bubble up. Initiation!!
          The other chasers took off and I watched the radar looking for where the best storm would take shape. A few small storms finally formed and were moving off to the northeast north of Grand Island. I followed them northeast on Hwy 30 and then north on Hwy 14. One of the storms became the dominant cell and began to race of to the northeast though at 60 mph. The storm "left behind", just kind of pulsed for a while weakening and strengthening. I went north through Fullerton and then east a ways on Hwy 56 briefly entertaining the thought of trying to catch up with the storm that was racing away from me. I gave up on that storm and found a spot to pull of the road on Hwy 56 to watch the storm back to my southwest still south and west of Fullerton.
The storm became more and more organized and soon I knew that would be the storm for me to watch. I moved into position to get in front of it heading back south and east on Hwy 39 eventually stopping several miles north of Silver Creek. The storm was back to my southwest and tried a few times to produce a wall cloud in the precip free base of the storm. Lightning was also very sharp and I didn't feel safe getting out of the car to take any pictures. After a good 15 minutes or so I dropped further south and soon a tornado warning was issued!
I pulled off the road where a few other chasers were and had a pretty good view of the back of the storm. For a brief while a pretty good rotating wall cloud formed and you could even hear the excitement from the other chasers as the optimism of a possible tornado forming was increasing. Fairly quickly though, the wall cloud dissipated and the storm moved off to the northeast and weakened.
At this point there were no other real impressive looking storms so I headed on home.

 Day 2 outlook highlighting moderate risk again across Nebraska

Day 2 probabilities of severe weather

Day 1 11:30 am outlook continuing moderate risk across Nebraska and into western Iowa now

 Day 1 hail outlook at 11:30 am

 Day 1 tornado probabilities

Day 1 wind probabilities

Initiation! Cumulus clouds growing rapidly near Grand Island

 small wall cloud forming

 sunlit storm still strengthening

 large wall cloud briefly formed and then dissipated

 first storms finally forming just before 6pm

 Severe warned storm at 720 pm. I'm the white circle just to the right of the red box

tornado warning finally issued at about 725!

 

6/3/14 High risk company chase in Nebraska

After a fairly quiet period since Mother's Day, the weather finally started picking up. I went out chasing on 6/1 and even though didn't see a lot, it was still nice to get out again. After that chase my eyes were already on the next potential chase and it looked like it would be a potentially huge day severe weather wise right across Nebraska.
Sure enough the SPC issued another moderate risk across Nebraska and into Iowa. A warm front was forecast to lie across the states, setting the stage for another similar set up to the Mother's Day outbreak. Besides tornadoes and very large hail, there was also talk of a derecho, which is a long lived line of very strong wind producing storms. Some of the wording out of the local weather offices was very concerning. The set up was potentially even more explosive than the outbreak on Mother's Day when several strong tornadoes touched down along with large hail, wind, and flooding rains.
This day's set up the offices talked of baseball or larger hail, strong tornadoes and wind over 70 mph!
Derek, Mike, and I wanted to make sure we were in position plenty early, so we left town early with an initial target of Albion, NE. We leisurely made our way west throughout the late morning. Meanwhile, an early morning storm that had formed around daybreak in southwest South Dakota continued trekking east/southeast just across the border into northern Nebraska. It gained strength throughout the morning and soon was warned for 100 mph winds and golf ball sized hail in north central Nebraska!
We briefly entertained the idea of heading north a bit to get a good look at the storm as I am sure it had some amazing structure, but decided to stay south of it. Eventually the storm started to head southeast and towards Omaha. Almost the entire time it was warned, it was warned for baseball sized hail and 70-80 mph winds. Reports coming in usually confirmed this as it moved through Norfolk and several other smaller towns.
Blair was soon the next town in the storms path, and the town was absolutely destroyed by the very large hail and high winds. The Woodside car dealership had several thousand cars damaged or destroyed with damage estimated at 10 million dollars! The courthouse was severely damaged. Other houses and vehicles were damaged as well and there were over 2 dozen minor injuries in Blair. The storm moved southeast from there just clipping northern Omaha and the airport. Winds and hail continued on into Iowa and the Omaha airport was closed for several hours.
Meanwhile back to the west, we continued to drift west, while I watched the radar for signs of initiation. Some of the severe indices were off the chart as well! Finally around 3 pm, the first returns showed up on radar near Burwell and Taylor Nebraska.  We were only about 20 miles away! The storms slowly grew and became more organized until finally a dominant cell formed west of Burwell. It soon showed very large hail and developed a hook echo!
We made our way to get into a good position to try and see the base of the storm. It became as dark as night as we got closer to the storm. A tornado warning was issued! We made our way west out of Burwell on highway 91. We couldn't see a wall cloud or any real strong rotation, but the storm looked so mean! The storm while it was organizing was pretty much stationary, but as we pulled up to it, it started it's forward motion at 45-50 mph.
We soon realized we had to get moving back to the east away from the storm. We went back to Burwell and then southeast towards Ord. One thing that was immediately odd was that the tornado warning box which showed up on my radar program was quite a ways south of where the storm was on radar and the storm was moving east.
We made it down to just outside of Ord and got out of the car to look at the storm behind us. According to the radar the storm should have been several miles to the north of us, but instead was almost on top of us again! In fact it was raining almost right away where we were and the radar showed no precip should be falling at our location. We again jumped back into the car and continued heading southeast down Hwy 11. Eventually, we made it to Hwy 22 which went east to Hwy 281. Reports of a tornado on the ground were coming in but it wasn't possible to see as the tornado was rain wrapped.
We dropped south on 281a bit so we could keep heading east on 22. At this point the storm was still tornado warned and again on radar looked to be at least several miles north/northwest of us. As we headed east towards Fullerton Nebraska, we could see ahead quite a ways to the east. Soon I noticed a lot of blowing dust and dirt started to blow across the road in front of us from north to south. The wind was strong enough that the dirt was getting lifted into the air fairly high, and there was a lot of debris being blown across the road. I don't mind dirt and pieces of corn stalks but what became worrisome was there were groves of trees along the north side of the highway and soon decent sized branches were getting blown down. I was worried that something bigger could come down. A few times visibility went down to several feet for a brief few seconds. Winds were estimated at 60-70 mph. It was a little nerve racking and again surprising because the storm looked to be quite a ways away from us on radar still.
We made it to Fullerton and headed south to try and get even further south of the storm. We hadn't made it more than a couple of miles outside of town when again we noticed a lot of dust being picked up in the fields to the west side of the highway in front of us to the south. Only this time, what really peaked my interest was that there was a pretty broad area of rotation out in the field and the dust was rising pretty quickly. Up in the clouds was a pretty noticeable area of rotation. A tornado was forming right in front of us, not more than a couple of hundred yards away from the road! At this point I had the choice of slowing down and letting the circulation pass the road in front of us or try to beat it across the road. The tornado was weak and moving fairly slowly to the east so I thought it would be best to try and beat it across the highway. I didn't want to stop where we were because I was worried about the storm approaching us at 50-60 mph that was warned for baseball hail and 70 mph winds.
As we moved south down the highway dust was blowing from west to east across the road, but soon inflow winds developed near the circulation/weak tornado and winds were now screaming from east to west across the road, again with blowing dust and other debris from a nearby building.
We made it to the area of blowing dust that was the worst and suddenly visibility dropped to literally zero! I have been in blizzards and never seen visibility this bad. What was so scary about this was being on a highway, only able to drive about 5 mph tops, and not knowing if someone is going to come flying up from behind and slam into us. Also, there was a truck in front of us that went into the dust storm first and we had no idea where it was.
The zero visibility lasted about 90 seconds to 2 minutes before we finally made it into the clear. We continued on to the next east west road and initially made an attempt to go east only to see blowing dust was already approaching the road in front of us. At this point, I decided to call off the chase, as the radar still wasn't accurately showing the very dangerous storm, the storm if it was producing a tornado, it was rain wrapped, and the storm motions were 50-60 mph.
We dropped down to I-80 at York and headed east towards Omaha. This entire time storms kept forming and were heading east over the same areas north of the warm front that ran from north central Nebraska southeast to just south of Omaha and into Iowa. The Omaha Eppley airport reported over 5" of rain and there was flash flooding in northeast Omaha. The last storm we ran into was a severe storm that crossed I-80 near Ashland. It had reports of golf ball to baseball sized hail and we were just behind it so we didn't run into any of that.
After all the storm reports came in there were only a handful of tornado reports, and only a couple of confirmed weak tornadoes. Most of the storms and especially the main, big storm that we were chasing ended up being a bit elevated as they were just too far north of the warm front. However, there was a ton of large hail reports up to softball sized and lots of high wind reports as well.
I posted a question on a chasing blog that I frequent asking if anyone else had issues with the radar program that I use. Other users of the same radar program also said they had similar problems with the radar not matching up with what the storm was doing and where it was located. I haven't heard any reasoning for why this happened.

 storm reports from the day- Nebraska was the place to be!

 day 2 outlook- already a moderate risk

 day 2 probabilities

 Day 1 outlook at 1130am

 hail probabilities

 tornado chances- 10% hatched area for possible strong tornadoes

 wind probabilities

 radar image of the storm we were chasing taken from around 4pm

 tornado warned storm we were chasing now about 6pm

 first storm developing north of Ord

 the main storm as we approach it west of Burwell

 the tornado warned storm made it dark as night at 4pm

 the storm still tornado warned but not able to see the tornado

 Mike, Derek, and I stopped for some pics after the first time driving through the high winds and blowing dust

 My customer Derek taking pics of the storm after our 2nd close call. You can see the blowing dust out in front of the storm on the right hand side

Pic of the tornado as it was starting to form just off of the highway in front of us!

6/1/14 Northern Kansas company chase

This chase was another guided chase with my regular customer Derek. It also marked the first time that I had chased in Kansas this year. This is kind of odd, as most years I have at least several chases in Kansas and some years most of my chases are in Kansas.
We left Omaha heading for the area near the Nebraska and Kansas border south of Kearney. I was hoping for some discrete cells that would give us the best chance of tornadoes. I also had rented a wide angle lens that I was excited to be able to use to hopefully catch some good structure.
Storms fired mainly in Kansas so we headed south into Kansas for the first time this season. Unfortunately, most of the storms never really exhibited strong rotation that was anything close to producing a tornado, so we ended up just playing around with the some of the stronger storms hoping to see something cool.
At one point, a small line of storms formed that were warned for strong winds. I figured this could be a good chance to get a good shot of a shelf cloud. We headed back west a bit to the storms and were treated to a beautiful shelf cloud and it was as dark as night back behind the shelf cloud. We had some time to take some shots and were also by a railroad track so it the scene made for some good shots. Finally the storm overtook us with some gusty winds and a lot of blowing dust.
We proceeded on again heading south a bit to try and get down to the southern "tail end Charlie" storm, which normally has the best chance of a tornado. We drove into pouring rain which made the going slow. Eventually we turned east and tried to get back in front of the line. About this time the line of storms had formed a pretty good bow echo and at the top of the apex of the bow a tornado warning was issued!
We desperately tried to get back up to that part of the storm but the forward motion of the storms were around 50-55 mph so it made it hard to catch up. Soon there were reports of a tornado on the ground and some damage reports started coming in.
We eventually did make it up to that part of the storm, but by that time the storms had weakened, so we started the drive home.

 radar image of storm when tornado warning was issued and possible tornado on the ground

 

storm relative velocity showing strong velocity couplet(bright red next to bright green)

 

 first shots of the shelf cloud coming into view

 shot up the gravel road looking at the approaching shelf cloud

 shelf cloud getting closer

 some shots with the railroad track in the pic

 another shot

 southern edge of shelf cloud which had some rotation

blowing dust out along the leading edge of the shelf cloud and gust front



5/11/2014 Mother's Day chase in Nebraska

This day's chase didn't result in seeing a lot of tornadoes, but I still experienced a lot of action and saw one of the biggest, meanest storms I have ever seen!
Originally, this day didn't look like much of an opportunity to chase. The instability and best chance of storms was going to set up way down in eastern Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. I didn't check the computer models for a few days, but decided to check them on Friday at the noon update. They looked impressive! Lots of parameters were pointing to a potential tornado outbreak on Sunday across Nebraska and Iowa!
On the day 2 outlook that came out Saturday for Sunday's setup, the SPC upgraded the risk to a moderate risk with the discussion of potentially strong, long track tornadoes. The only worry was whether morning thunderstorms that were forecast to develop on Sunday morning would ruin the instability across the area.
Sunday morning I awoke to the expected thunderstorms. Some were severe with large hail across south central Nebraska and moved east across Nebraska into Iowa. At my house, I received .8" of rain.
Now it was time to hope the clouds would burn off and allow the sun to come out and create lots of instability. There was a warm front across northern Kansas that would be trying to lift north and where that front set up would be important for where the strongest storms would be. Slowly the clouds started to clear and move out throughout the late morning, especially in south central Nebraska and through the early afternoon in eastern Nebraska.
I had planned on heading out with a friend Mike, by 1-130 and head southwest towards Hastings, Nebraska. We left a little later than planned heading west around 200.
By 245, a tornado watch was issued for most of south central into eastern Nebraska. At 300, the SPC increased their odds for tornadoes and said in their outlook that there was a pretty good chance of a strong long track tornado from west of Lincoln through Omaha and into Iowa. The first cell formed south of Hastings and slowly strengthened. I was unsure if that would be the storm of the day and continued to watch and wait for something to form further east. We made it to York and headed south, making it to Geneva, Nebraska, and then headed west towards Clay Center.
We approached the storm and suddenly it came into view. From the very beginning this storm was visually amazing. Our first view of the storm provided us with lots of blowing dust and gustnadoes across the open fields. The sky was dark and swirling like crazy back in the storm.
The RFD from the storm soon overtook us with strong winds and we headed east. The storm itself was heading northeast so we had to find a way to stay close to it and move northeast with it. That meant trying to navigate the gravel roads. The roads though weren't that good from the rain that fell earlier in the day. We tried to use them but kept coming across roads that were too muddy to even try so we eventually made our way back to Hwy 81 just south of Fairmont Nebraska.
As we approached Fairmont from the south things got pretty crazy for a while. The storm was to our north and northwest and had had reports of tornadoes on the ground for quite a while, but we couldn't see any of those due to them being rain wrapped. We came up to the intersection for Hwy 6 at Fairmont and started to get blasted with RFD winds again. Mike looked to the east and suddenly saw a tornado off in the distance! This tornado was a surprise as it wasn't back in the main hook of the storm. He snapped a couple of pics before it disappeared. There was some debris blowing across the road and part of a gas station sign was ripped off.
We turned east on Hwy 6 looking for the tornado but it was gone. We got into some rain and the rain curtains kept changing directions as we drove east through Exeter and Friend! This is a sign of strong rotation directly above us.
Meanwhile the meanest part of the storm kept producing tornadoes as it moved by Cordova and Beaver Crossing heading towards I-80. Hwy 6 turned north towards the interstate so while the storm was moving east and northeast it was now gaining on us. I kept a close watch on the radar and now there was a report of a tornado near the interstate and it was moving due east now.
The scariest part of our chase occurred next as we came up to the Milford exit on I-80. The winds started screaming again from the west as the RFD started to blast us. There was again debris blowing across the road and some small branches flying through the air. The car was kind of hard to control as the winds blew across us. Right before we approached the exit I looked to the west and in the heavy precip core to our west, there appeared to be a darker column that could have been a tornado. We got to the interstate and blasted east. Shortly thereafter, there was a report of 90 mph winds at the exit!
We went east to Lincoln and went north and there had a good view of the storm to our west/ northwest. Here the storm was probably the coolest looking storm I've ever seen. It had an amazingly long inflow tail and the sky had shades of green in it.
We dropped back to the interstate to continue heading east/northeast. The storm was now becoming more "messy", and had no real hook to it and the best areas of rotation kept changing but were always imbedded in the rain and hail. We made more attempt to go north to get closer but had to turn around as the storm beat us to the highway we were heading north on.
Back on I-80, the storm started producing crazy cloud to ground lightning. We even saw several strikes hit radio towers off of the road. The storm continued on towards Omaha and the western suburb of Elkhorn. It was weakening however and soon was "only" severe warned for some hail and wind. No tornado warning was active. Soon thereafter though a tornado warning was issued and this included western Omaha.
Mike and I were now on Hwy 31/204th street heading north towards Elkhorn. The storm started to overtake us and the rain and wind was coming down hard. I was still watching the radar though and soon noticed an area of rotation west of Elkhorn. I decided to stop to let the storm move past us. After waiting for the rain and wind to let up we continued north where we started to run into some damage done to trees and road signs near Elkhorn. We continued home and everything was okay at my house, but the neighbors lost a smaller tree.
There was reports of some much more significant damage to areas in Elkhorn and the NWS has come out with a damage survey that shows 2 tornadoes touched down in Elkhorn. The 2nd tornado actually went about 2 miles northwest of our house! Wind gusts across most of the central and northern half of Omaha were 70-75 mph. An 82 mph wind gust occurred at the Omaha Eppley airport! At one point there were almost 24,000 people without power in the Omaha area.
At the time of this writing there is believed to be 11 tornadoes across south central into eastern Nebraska with a couple of the tornadoes rated EF-3.
Overall, this was a pretty fun chase with an amazing long lasting supercell. I wish we could have seen more tornadoes but again they were all mostly rain wrapped.

 Day 2 outlook

Day 2 outlook probabilities

Day 1 3pm outlook



 Day 1 3pm tornado outlook(notice the 15% hatched red area right over Lincoln and Omaha)

Day 1 3pm hail probabilities

First tornado warning near Clay Center. I am the white circle under the purple line.

 Tornado warned storm approaching Beaver Creek. Severe damage would later occur in Beaver Creek.

 Tornado over Beaver Creek. Again I am the white circle under the red box towards the bottom.

Storm moving into Omaha. The tornado was about to touch down near Elkhorn. I am the white circle in the purple box. The tornado would be right above me in the green colors. This is a notch where tornadoes can occur.

 Storm as we first approached near Clay Center, NE

 more shots of the storm as it moved northeast across south central Nebraska

 several areas of rotation on the HP storm

 storm northwest of Lincoln. one of the coolest looking storms I have ever seen!

 again

ground scraping inflow cloud into the storm!

 

The storm produced some heavy rainfall totals across most of eastern Nebraska. Some totals up to 7" were reported. Here at my house, my rain gauge measured 2.73" of rain

 

I will post some video once I get it uploaded. Here are some other clips of videos taken by other chasers on this storm.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DDc3qlK4qg&feature=youtu.be

 

Damage surveys from Omaha and Hastings:

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=oax&storyid=102229&source=0

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=gid&storyid=102204&source=0