March 23, 2009 Wahoo and Omaha Tornado Warned Cells
A little after noon Derrick Herndon texts me about the tornado watch for Central Nebraska, So I'm for sure going now, Just have to wait till class gets over...which sucks. I get like 5 texts from NWS about severe thunderstorm warnings "somewhere in central Neb." (Ok, so I signed up for this alert service for severe weather, and I picked out just eastern Neb, and western Iowa to get alerts from and the NWS sends me messages with each severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings. Only problem is, they don't tell you for which county the warning is for! I got 48 texts that meant nothing to me, it was really freaking annoying.)
Couldn't leave Omaha until 3:30pm after storms had fired, there was a line to the west from Schuyler to David City, and I was planning on intercepting the southern cell on that line. This was the last time I would look at radar for the rest of the chase. I don't have anyway of getting mobile data, but after this chase, I realize that if I'm going to chase after storms have fired, I'm going to need to at least be able to see radar. My friend Grant came along, to shoot video, although, we really didn't see anything worth shooting for. So we headed west on Hwy 92 towards Wahoo (Winds were blowing 30-35mph sustained almost the entire chase, gusts to 50), after coming into town, we hear the sirens start sound...sweet, we thought...keep going and once we got outside of town we can begin to see the base of the updraft. But unfortunately its crap, I'm not even sure this cell was why it was Tornado Warned. Here is what we see first...
As we follow it North we come to a closed road and there is only a west option! with storms moving at nearly 55mph NNE, you can't move west at all. But we tried to play catch up after realizing this was probably our only storm of the day. But of course we quickly lost it. We wandered our way back to Wahoo and took 92 back when Grant got a call from his sister about tornado warnings in Omaha. So now we are trying to rush home as fast as possible so we don't miss anything. Near Yutan we got stopped by train crossing...but there was no train, so the guy in front of me just went around them lol, and I followed. And on we go! well we got a little wet in a downdraft when my dad calls, and tells me there is a wall cloud sited at hwy 50 and I80, so I keep going thinking we will catch this thing perfectly. I get off hwy 92 onto 6 and can see the wall cloud, so I take 6 down to dodge, where I get on and take to 180th, where we sit and watch it crap out. Here is a view of it from the Dodge onramp... this is just part of it, the main lowering was to the right, I didn't have a good shot of it though.
We headed home after watching the wall cloud fall apart after likely crossing the Missouri River. Overall not a bad chase for only racking up 105 miles, especially in March. One thing I learned from this chase is that I pretty much won't chase fast systems anymore, its just too hard to get stills and navigate and everything else at the same time and still keep up with the storm.
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