| The morning
in O'Neill started off with a slew of elevated storms firing ahead of a
strong LLJ. What made this day's forecast a challenge was the presence
of abundant low and mid level ceilings throughout much of the warm sector.
As a result, we decided to head west to Valentine and play south of there
along the advancing dryline where insolation would be much better.
Later that afternoon, we stopped near the 88D in Thedford, NE to watch
the clearing skies advance in from the west, but low level instability
was not being realized and our sfc winds began shifting to the southwest
(unngh!). By this point we figured SPC's MD of initiation further
east in the cloud-laden skies might be viable. Sure enough, TCu popped
~40 miles to our east and we decided to head after them. Oddly, the
overcast skies began evaporating as these TCu anviled out into crisp Cbs.
We chased a Cb near Taylor
that exhibited a nice beaver's tail, but it failed to produce anything
more. With the help of some nowcasting by Phil's wife, we headed
northeastwards toward Amelia to check out a supercell that had already
produced a confirmed tornado. My co-workers and company were fortunate
enough to be on this cell from early on in its life and managed to get
some photos of its first tornado (see here).
By the time we reached it, a persistent wet RFD had been established and
it took on an HP structure. Still determined, we navigated near the
eroding meso and were shocked to encounter recent damage to a grove of
trees and power lines from one of the tornadoes. Our east road was
blocked ahead, so we were forced to turn back south and find another east road to keep pace.
Outside of a nicely flanged
updraft base, we didn't see much else prior to this supercell evolving
into an MCS. We made tracks south to Grand Island as a beautiful
shelf cloud unfolded nearby and later observed a colorful cell at sunset. |
