Day 7: Finally, a storm!

We all woke up this morning, begrudgingly, around 8:00am.  We had hoped we would sleep in longer, but that wasn't the case.  However, the models were showing us that we could either continue on up to Iowa and chase storms there, or head west for the middle of Kansas.  Since we were all too tired from the night before, we decided to take a nap and meet half an hour before check-out at noon when the new model updates would be out.

After that relaxing nap, our forecast leaders for the day decided Iowa should be our destination, and so up north out of Kansas City we went!  An hour north of the city we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for lunch.  Oh, it was so nice to have mashed potatoes, chicken and dumplings!!  AND... I had green beans!!  Even though I've had good food these past few days, nothing beats a homestyle meal.

After lunch, our lead professor really decided it would be better to head to Kansas, and so he pushed us all to think in terms of driving west.  We agreed, and raced toward Salina, Kansas, since that is where storm initiation would be taking place.  It was a rush to get there... a dryline would be pushing storms to develop around 5:00-6:00pm, and we had to push it to get there.  As we got closer to the area a few storms fired up, and it was difficult deciding whether to chase these storms that were moving along at about 45-50 knots (50-60 mph) or to sit and wait for storms further south to come at us.

We made the decision to hurtle up towards the storms that were already in our area, and we saw our lead professor in his full-throttle mode.  After getting off the interstate, on a north-south road that would take us to our storm, we ended up driving way above the speed limit in order to catch up.  At one point our van was going 95mph... the speedometer only goes up to 100 on those vans, so we were really pushing the limits.

Eventually we stopped in a position to watch one of the storms from a safe distance.  Above we could see the mammatus clouds in all their glory!!

These clouds are formed by the rolling winds aloft, and signify a healthy storm.

Off in the distance we were seeing whether a wall-cloud would develop in the storm, which would indicate rotation within the storm's center.  We started to observe that the storm was weakening, since the radar showed that more storm clouds were developing on the tail end of it, choking off the updraft that keeps a storm alive.  After about 15 minutes of picture taking, radar analysis, and talking with another chaser, we decided it'd be best to see if the storm developing behind our current one would better for chasing.  Back in the vans we went.

Look at the top of the clouds... see how it's like the whole top of the storm is slowly whirling?

Unfortunately, our route to get to the next storm took us on some really "local" roads... mainly dirt roads.  Some of them were muddy, and we were kind of afraid at certain points just because of how rugged the terrain was.

We stopped at another point and got out to observe/take more pictures.  By that point we only had about 45 minutes of daylight left, and while that's not too terrible we were also on dirt roads that could be extremely difficult if rain headed our way.  Also, the storms appeared to continue weakening... Not really worth chasing, especially if it took forever for us to go through dirt roads at 30 mph.  While we didn't get to see a strong storm, we at least got to see a storm!  It's the best we've had since last Tuesday.

After dinner we went up north and are now in York, Nebraska.  Tomorrow looks promising for the Dakotas, and the Storm Prediction Center has already issued a moderate risk for that area.  The biggest issue is NOT whether storms will fire, but how many and how wide-spread it will be.  Conditions may be such that there will be too many storms for us to chase safely, especially if they form a fast-moving squall line.  But we shall see what happens...