Day 8: An eventful day.

It's been a highly emotional day.  To think we were so calm in the morning. We woke up in York, Nebraska, which is about 50 miles due West of Lincoln, Nebraska.  We were positioned in the middle of the state and thought this would be a great place for storms.  A cold front would push through the state in the middle of the afternoon, firing up storms that would push across the state.  Conditions were so good for storms that we knew we would be facing a massive quall-line of storms, and not just a few little supercells.  So we knew that if we were to see storms that would be good for chasing, without risk of being pommeled by the storm as we tried to watch it, our best bet would be to view storms as soon as they first started to form.  The longer we waited, the more likely they would mold together and create a massive line.

We had quite a bit of drama in the morning.  At first our consensus was to head west across southern Nebraska and stop along Interstate 80 in a town called Kearny for lunch.  Some of us had thought that it would be best then to head north since radar-models suggested that storms would fire in the northern part of the state first.  However, the two people leading our chase for the day wanted to stay in southern Kansas, since the bottom edge of the storm is where the more isolated storms tend to form.

Our group was split down the middle, and there were a lot of grumblings and frustration.  I personally was one of the people who wanted to move, not so much because I knew any better, but because some of our more-experienced chasers knew that it would be foolish to sit around and wait while cumulous clouds were already starting to appear up north.  Our chase leaders were less experienced and didn’t want to take advice, so our deadlock was infuriating, and our lead professor didn’t have an opinion either way, so he left us to our own politics.

Eventually our chase leaders were convinced that it was time to move, and we headed up north “in no hurry” more to appease those of us who wanted to go.  Within the hour storms started to fire up north, but we were too far south of them and the storms were moving too fast for us to catch them.  These storms were heading almost straight north, slightly east, at a speed of nearly 45 knots (50 mph).  Not only were we so far behind those first storms, but we also had to deal with straight-line winds that were blowing around our 6’5’’ tall vans.  We couldn’t get more than 60mph because of those winds, and chasing those first few storms was nearly impossible.

Our view of the storms from our van.  We were afraid that this is all we were going to see of them!

 All of the people in my van were furious at this point, since all of us were the ones who wanted to head up north and not dilly-dally around after lunch.  And now we had missed those storms that were heading so far north!  

We were just too far south of the storms!

Thunderstorm Warnings were issued up there, along with signatures on the radar that indicated tornadic rotation in the clouds.  However, behind those north-moving storms were other little storms trying to fire up.  A lot of the ones trying to form died after a few minutes.  Yet they kept appearing.  After about an hour we finally started getting around to some of those lower storms.

Basically, after we tried to catch those first few storms we started heading south to see what other storm-cells were building behind them.  The first few storms we positioned ourselves around had some nice structure, but chasing overall today was rather difficult.  In north-western Nebraska we faced the terrain of the sand-hills, which offers a lot of rolling hills and terrible road-networking.

This terrain caused for a lot of blocked vision and winding roads that  made chasing more difficult.

At one point we were able to stop and really observe the structure of one of our storms.  The rain, the wall cloud, the inflow notch… it was all classic, textbook style.  However, things started to break up after a few minutes and we started heading south again toward another storm.

That lighter-colored notch indicates a very strong updraft, feeding energy into the storm.   Our professor whipped out a diagram later last night he's used in class and it looked almost exactly the same.

So many chasers were out today, it was crazy.  We saw The Weather Channel and the  Tornado Hunters.  We also saw an old graduate from Ball State too, and there were also many others along the roads.

The Weather Channel's Doppler on Wheels was riding right behind us for some time.  We finally were able to snap a picture of it as we pulled into a gas station.

At one point we saw a storm that showed decent rotation, and we thought about heading to a position to intercept it.  As we drove we could see small eddies in the sky spinning like crazy.  Even though a mesocyclone, the deep vertical rotation of a thunderstorm, is normally in the center of the storm, when we have winds changing direction with height and windspeeds increasing with height, it’s easy for rotation to appear in different areas of the storm.

As we were driving along a particular storm, we ended up being right in its path.  We

 were very limited on which roads we could take, and we ended up having no escape route!  The storm that was showing rotation that could form a tornado was headed right toward us!!

We had to continue heading south, and fast!  At this point the storms were heading more east, than north, and they were going to pommel us with hail, if not a tornado, if we didn’t get far enough south.  There was a time or two where we thought we had enough of a window where we could stop and take pictures.  But it wasn’t long before he had to move on again, and we just barely made it!

All edge of the storm, gustnados were forming on and off.  These are small areas of rotation that can form dust-devil like whirls.  Technically they are tornados, since the rotation can be scene both at the clouds and at the ground.  However, you can’t normally see the entire thing rotating since the winds aren’t tightly wrapped.  They are pretty much like weak tornados that don’t have strong support and won’t last long.  But they can still do damage and can be dangerous to encounter.

We traveled parallel to the edge of the storm, with the heart of it still heading toward us, as we witnessed gustnados stir up and die off along the edge of storm.  It was both beautiful and horrifying to see all these rotating clouds pop up all around us.  It’s like those nightmares I’ve had in my sleep since childhood… being surrounded by tornadoes.  While I admire them in all their might and beauty, I also have a deep respect for their power and destruction, and do not wish to be in their path.

Eventually our road took us southeast, slightly ahead of the storm… and straight into the path of a gustnado that was about to cross the road!!  As our vans drove toward it we had to make a choice… we could stop and wait for the thing to pass, and risk being hit by the hail core or possible funnel cloud behind us, or drive straight through and risk being blown over or our windows being blown in if debris were to hit us!!

Suddenly our lead professor gunned his van and blasted down the road right before the gustnado hit the road.  We were in the van behind him, and we weren’t so lucky… we were caught up in the gustnado!!  As we drove down the road we could see nothing but swirling dust around us, small debris flying.  Gustnado Video - Teri Watkins

An irrigation chain in the field next to us completely tipped over and fell down along the hole field… at the time I didn’t realize how lucky we were that it stayed in the field and didn’t come flying into the road.  We saw light ahead and floored the gas pedal until we were out.  Honestly, we were lucky that we survived that without any major damage to our van.  After looking at the video later we even saw that we may have just missed the vortex of that gustnado… which could have been even worse…

We still weren’t out of danger yet.  Even though we got out of that whirling dust, which looked to be a mile wide, we were still in the path of the mesocyclone that could produce a tornado.  Our road took us back through the town of Kearney, NE, which is where we had stopped for lunch earlier that day.  Driving through that little town at 30 mph was frustrating, especially seeing all the people moving about their business there with seemingly no concern of what danger was heading their way.  Tornado sirens started going off, and we hit the interstate to head East as fast as we could.

Right after we got on the interstate we started observing the edge of the storm.  We were focused on a few places where other gustnados might be whirling.  Then… I saw it!!  A huge verticle rotating mass… a tornado!!  I asked the others who were looking further back and we all stared shouting in excitement at what appeared to be a tornado!!  It was scary, since we didn’t know whether it was running parallel to us or if it was going to cross the Interstate.   Our driver kept that car bustin’ forward, and we were able to get a great view of that tornado before our view of it started to get covered by rain.  Video of Tornado, by Lindsey Moistner.

After a minute or two we couldn’t see it anymore, and we were ahead of the storm in a dangerous position to do any more chasing.  With dusk coming and those storms producing crazy, unpredictable winds we just needed to get the hell out of there.

Lucas is pointing to our location on the radar.  See all those little circles?  Those are bad news if we didn't get moving!

The rest of the night was a hot chase east to get ahead of those storms.  At this point there was a line of storms extending from the Dakotas all the way down to the middle of Kansas.  And the portion where we were kept showing signature after signature of tornados and hail on the radar, and as the sky darkened we were in a dangerous situation.  Ahead of the storm front, like earlier in the day, we had straight-line winds that were blowing us all over the road.  And while at least before we were on smaller roads, tonight we had to share the Interstate with semis that kept waving back and forth in the wind.  It was a pretty tense 150 miles all the way back to Lincoln, Nebraska.

Now we’re in a Comfort Inn in Lincoln for the night.  We made it about 45 minutes ahead of the storm front, which had weakened some since we had last encountered it.  Tomorrow we don’t plan to chase anywhere, since nothing really looks good in our part of the country for chasing.  This will be a great time to rest since a lot of the people on our team have great videos and pictures to upload.