Days 9, 10, 11: Rest, Fatigue, Exhaustion

It's been a few days since I've written since I've been absolutely exhausted.  On Day 9 I crashed pretty much as soon as I got to the hotel, and yesterday we were in the car for over 12 hours.

Day 9: We had a down day in Lincoln, Nebraska.  All the risk for severe storms was over in the Midwest (Michigan, to be exact) and so we had no reason to pack up and leave our hotel.  It was nice to rest... we went to a laundry mad hat, saw Hangover 2 (which kind of horrified me) and had a few drinks at a local sports bar.  Not too shabby...

Day 10: Our risk for storms was set to be in Western Nebraska, so we traveled due west to set up.  As the day went on we started to see more clouds like these:

When expecting storm development we watch for towering cumulus clouds like these., which indicate rising air.

We knew that storms would be firing soon... and eventually we saw on radar a storm that was quickly growing into something we could chase.

A few miles outside of Lexington, NE, we got our first view of a storm for the day.  We even saw a wall-cloud form, which means the storm was healthily rotating at the center.  Later on we even saw a funnel spout down... but it only lasted for a few seconds before going up into the cloud.

The storm actually lasted a pretty long time... and it was easy to chase too.  It pretty much stayed within the same 20 mile radius for several hours before it finally died.  At one point we let the storm pass us while we grabbed dinner (it looked like it was starting to die, but then later it rejuvenated) and we headed straight back into the rain of the storm.  On the way end we got to see a rainbow!

This storm ended up dying without producing anything more than small hail.  But it was still fun to chase.  We stayed in northern Nebraska with the intent of driving up north to the Dakotas the next day.

At least we got a pretty sunset!

Day 11:  This day was a pain.  We had to get up super early because it would be a 7+ hour drive to make it to South Dakota before storms fired.  Not much to say about the drive... it was long, tiring, and made me stiff from sitting in the same place  The terrain in South Dakota is much flatter, and I'm pretty sure the water table is in general a lot higher than in places like Indiana - there were a lot of places that had standing water.


And I'm sure the area is somewhat used to flooding because I saw quite a few yellow-headed black birds.  I'm guessing for these birds to be around there has to be enough marshy-areas to support them.

Yellow-Headed Black Bird - lives in marshy areas in the central to western parts of the United States.  So cute!!

Storms started to fire late afternoon, and we were in good position to see them even though we had to travel quite a ways to get to them.  From far back we could see the storms building - oh, they were enormous and beautiful!  The anvil of the cloud went on forever!  It was cool to watch them just rise from afar - because the land was so flat we could see the storms from miles away.

The storm was beautiful for looking at - but as far as structure is concerned from a strength-perspective, it was terrible.  There wasn't much wind-shear to cause rotation within the storms, and actually they ended up dying out within about an hour.  We positioned ourselves in a couple of good places though to get some good pictures.

We eventually just let the storm pass over us, though by that point it was just an empty cloud-base.

View of the clouds, straight up, as we were driving towards finding a hotel.

After that we decided to start looking for a place to stay for the evening.  The problem was that there weren't that many hotels available in the middle of South Dakota.  We were actually chasing on an Indian Reservation at the time, and all the local casinos were booked.  There was a lot of conflict, drama, grouchiness as we all bickered about where to go - should we drive another 2 hours down to Nebraska?  Should we go up to the next biggest city in North Dakota, even though we'd have to backtrack and go south the next day?  We eventually found a hotel in a nearby town called Mobridge.  We had trouble booking the hotel at first - the phone lines were busy.  However, we found out why a little later...

As we pulled up to the hotel, we saw another car caravan pull into the parking lot.  A very distinct looking vehicle pulled in, and we all got excited!!  IT WAS THE TIV!!  For those of you who don't know, the T.I.V. (Tornado Intercept Vehicle) is a specially designed armored car built for driving into the path of a tornado by Sean Casey, a famous storm chaser.  And all those other cars with him were filmmakers for the discovery Channel's show Storm Chasers!!  It was pretty exciting.