Updates galore

Okay so it has been a pretty busy set of days. July 13th was pretty good in that 8 of us went out and we caught a striated supercell that teased us for about 5 hours. No tornadoes, but the structure was impressive.

We went back to Winnipeg and Wxdog picked me up in the morning for our chase vacation, which we're on now. We targeted near Minneapolis and had to get there in a hurry.

Not fast enough, it turned out. Storms blew up a bit on the early side and lined out after about half an hour. It was a long, frustrating day.

Wxdog and I then started off in Omaha, NE, with our initial target being somewhere around Akron, CO. We liked the dewpoints into the 60s in the area and although the 500 mb flow was meager, we thought with some okay 850 winds opposing them that we might get Wxdog a birthday surprise.

During the drive the RADAR showed us a mesoscale rotation area southwest of Akron, and convergence looked to be at a maximum just east thereof, a sign that our initial target was going to be close to working out.

We got to Ogallala, NE and saw the cumuli bubbling up to our south and southwest, which was corroborated by the visible satellite imagery: initiation was there. Driving to Akron we saw 3 distinct storms--one off to the southwest south of Denver, as well as a pair of okay-looking storms to our south and southeast. We decided, based on RADAR-observed storm motion, to go south and try to a) see both storms from behind and b) perhaps drive in between them. We got almost straight east of the dividing line between the two storms. On the way between them we saw some beautiful midlevel funnels that never came close to threatening the ground.

When we got to the front side of the storms we booked south to see what they looked like and what we saw was pretty cool: the north storm had a feature on it that looked like an epic struggle between becoming shelfy and wall-y. Some close lightning told us to leave the area so we went south, eventually getting onto the now-dominant south storm.

Some repositioning later we found ourselves south of the now south-moving storm that had some weak rotation in it, but visually and on RADAR it looked outflow-dominant. We kept with it for a while but, realizing we were getting into an area of weaker and weaker upper winds, decided to leave the storm.

Which, of course, is when it decided to look like a supercell on RADAR. A hook emerged out of the mess and we were just southeast of it: almost perfect position. We repositioned ourselves to be just east of the hook so we could see the inflow region, and we were treated to a gorgeous HP supercell beast with moderate rotation in it. It was moving south at quite a clip now, so we had to take our pictures and get out of there. It looked okay for about half an hour then became outflow-dominant again. We stood by the side of the road wondering what to do when we saw another inflow feature develop to our northwest. The outflow had collapsed and left us with another chance--and RADAR confirmed this soon enough.

Long story short, another beautiful stacked-plates laminar flow HP supercell emerged and we were in perfect position to see the beaver's tail, the storm-scale rotation and more significant low-level rotation. At one point it put down a cone funnel that went about halfway to the ground, but this was about the best it could do.

It soon became outflow-dominant and, as it was getting pretty late and pretty dark, we gave up for the day, and that's when the storm really lined out and finished the day for us. A medium-length drive to Goodland, KS and a stop for dinner with CoD ensued, and we went to our hotel for the night. Wxdog was happy with his birthday storms.

Yesterday was a repositioning day with marginal chance. We hung on as long as we could near Imperial, NE, but it didn't go.

Now for today. We're currently driving north from Sioux City, IA to somewhere around Fargo. Let's go over that list again.

Moisture: plentiful. Surface dewpoints in the area are already in the mid to upper 60s F and should reach 70 with ET and advection.

Instability: awesome. Because of the moisture and steep midelevel lapse rates observed on upstream soundings (BIS, ABR) there will be no shortage of instability.

Lift: great. In fact take your pick. Surface low, warm front, cold front. I like the low itself near the warm front. Either way, plenty.

Shear: very good. 50 knots is coming in aloft and the low-level winds should really crank up this afternoon with the approach of the upper flow.

In short, it looks like a promising day. The only negative I can think of is too much forcing, which could cause the storms to go linear in a hurry. Because of the proximity of the surface low, I don't think that's as likely to happen today as it was a couple of days ago in Minnesota. Backed winds near the front should help to keep storms discrete loner. But watch out, southern Minnesota: you'll likely get a major wind damage event this evening and/or tonight.

Follow us along if you like. We call ourselves "Winnipeg chasers".