An actual post about the last chase day

I suppose I ought to post about yesterday's chase. We decided to play the edge of the cap and its intersection with the sagging cold front--said cold front was sagging through Nebraska. We got in place nice and early and sat to play the waiting game. And wait we did. We were pretty close to initiation, too, and when it went, we saw some pretty neat storms. The storm that looked the best was a little to our southwest; it had a ragged, albeit somewhat high-based, wall cloud, and the updraft/downdraft separation was obvious. After a few minutes, a rather interesting dust swirl appeared on the ground, a little offset from being right underneath the wall cloud but not by much. It persisted for a few minutes and moved off, and it was clear by the end of its life that it was a gustnado. A few minutes later, another one formed and behaved much in the same manner. Eventually the storm really started to move (~70 km/h) so we had to take off to keep up with it. Problem was, we had the Missouri River to contend with. There aren't unlimited crossings, so we had to cross it south of the storm's path, as it was going right toward another crossing. The crossing was about 20 miles south of the storm, just far enough that we couldn't see it. While we were turning east to get to the river crossing, we witnessed a close call for an accident. I won't go into the details (no, it didn't involve us) but it just goes to show: the most dangerous part of storm chasing is the driving. Anyhow, we finally got back around to see the storm and it was waging an epic battle between outflow and inflow. It would appear, at various times, to have a huge gust front and then the storm would surge ahead of it and there would be an obvious wall cloud. Anyhow, we chased it (literally) for about 3 hours before giving up, as it was still moving away to us at such a speed that we could barely match, and it was starting to get dark. So we decided to stop, tripod and take lightning pictures. Wouldn't you know it, another storm popped up to our west, and it got severe warned. So after finishing up our lightning pictures, we decided to core punch. I know, I know, I rail against it, but we had good reason to believe that this core wouldn't be all that bad--for one, its RADAR presentation was that it was putting out quarter-sized hail, maybe, and for two, the largest hail that had been reported in the area from any storm was quarter-sized. So we went for it. Once we hit the core, we had to stop. Visibility was zero in heavy rain and small hail (we missed the bigger stuff) and, although I really really suck at estimating wind speeds, I wouldn't be surprised if the winds met the NWS severe criterion. The storm soon passed and we went to the hotel for the night. Not a bad day.