We started the morning in Dodge City, Kansas (KDDC, my fave, as DDC are my initials) and bombed northwest to be in place for initiation. We stopped for an awesome lunch at Hog Wild Pit BBQ in Salina and took off north. We saw anvils way ahead of us, anvils from a morning MCS that was going on over southern South Dakota and northern Nebraska. ACC dotted the sky and as we got into Nebraska a fairly juicy field of cumulus clouds greeted us. Good omens all.
As many know, I'm an ingredients-based forecaster. I love just breaking forecasting severe thunderstorms down into forecasting the component ingredients: moisture, instability, shear and trigger. Well, the 4 were well-satisfied. For moisture, we had surface dewpoints in the low 2os Celsius. Instability was plentiful, with widespread 3000+ J/kg of MLCAPE over most of Nebraska. Wind shear was good, with 40 knots or more of deep-layer shear over the area. Low-level shear was not bad and forecast to improve with the onset of the nocturnal low-level jet. Further, low-level shear was to be maximized along the outflow boundary.
So what was the problem?
In short, I don't know, and all of us in the vehicle are trying to figure it out.
I think it was or could have been a couple of things. First off, an early- to mid-morning MCS also hit southern Nebraska. This could have overturned the atmosphere, making it much more stable than the models led us to believe. Second off, the low-level jet may have been a bit too late to counteract the outflow dominance of the storms that kept going from the northern Nebraska MCS. Third, the timing of the upper wave and therefore the major lift appears to have been a bit earlier than we would have preferred, as it meant the formation of a surface low near Lincoln, NE and veered winds (and therefore less low-level directional shear) made for less convergence at peak time.
All in all, for all the hype:
We got a bow echo-ish thing. It had a bookend vortex tornadic supercell on its north end, near Omaha. But otherwise ... nothing worth looking at. Even the shelf cloud of the storm was only okay.
So Dee and I have night shifts tomorrow night, so we stopped at Jazz in Omaha for dinner (very good Louisiana food) and are now heading to Brookings, SD with our tails between our legs from today.
Don't get me wrong: this trip was a total success, and we said yesterday that anything we saw today would be gravy.
But still, that gravy was pretty insipid.
:( that's unfortunate. From the non-chasing perspective, up here in finally sunny alberta, the satellite images were kind of cool. The main anvil over eastern nebraska and most of iowa had gravity waves on it . . .and in late afternoon it litterally took over the anvil of the storms to the west as it spread out. Along the edge of the 'taking over' area was a really neat wave.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you guys all saw this . . . I just thought it was cool enough to mention.
Have a good trip back tomorrow! Hope the night shifts go alright!!