Oh moisture, moisture, wherefore art thou, moisture?

This trip has been marked by a lack of moisture. May is usually moist in the southern and central plains. But a couple of weeks ago a cold front blasted through the states and flushed the moisture out of the region. It's because of this cold front that storms have struggled to get really meaty during this trip. Even the tornadoes that have happened while we were here (that we missed, naturally) have been short-lived. This is just not a scenario I had even considered to be possible in late May here. Anyhow, yesterday we got to our target of Valentine, NE (can't be a chase trip without at least once going through Cherry County) and storms were starting to go. We didn't have a great visual because a) it was pretty hazy and b) there was lots of cirrus overhead. Still, though, RADAR was great help to us. A storm eventually went in our area and was looking pretty good on RADAR, and it even got severe warned. Then we got within viewing distance and, wouldn't you know it, the storm up and died. Like the previous day it wasn't a quick death; it took a few minutes to completely choke off, and it even made one valiant attempt at regeneration. But in the end, it seems the storm killers struck again. There were a couple of silver linings in that cloud, however: first, because we didn't go north, we didn't waste a whole bunch of money and time on storms that were underwhelming; second, we got a couple of good lightning shots. Today is looking not bad, although the orientation of the shear vectors with respect to the forcing isn't all that good. A cold front will be sagging through southern Nebraska and western Iowa, and storms should fire along it. Whether they put out for us is another question, but you never know--mesoscale accidents happen all the time. Or so I hear.