April 4, 2009 Sutton, Nebraska mini Supercell
Spent most of the day in Lincoln at the Central plains severe weather symposium, while watching chase videos in a computer lab, I opened up SPC to see the new outlook, and sure enough a slight risk just south of Lincoln. Over lunch we (I was with a fairly big group at the symposium, 11 people) looked over the data, almost everything was there, except moisture and maybe instability, dew's were only in the upper thirties at noon! a little discouraged by that, we waited to make the decision and headed back to the symposium for a while. Later we decided to go, and left Lincoln in a 4 car caravan. We were targeting an area south of York on hwy 81.
One of our cars had mobile data (GRlevel3 I think) so it was pretty easy to find a good storm to get on. After getting off I-80 we drove south through a bit of precip and intercepted a storm west of Geneva. We could see the base, but needed to get closer, kept going on 81 and stopped south of town. We observed some rotation of the base for about 5 minutes. Here is an animation...
The storm was moving almost due north, so we took hwy 41 west to get a closer view of it. Went about 4 miles west of town and took a short drive north to catch up a bit. Stopped on some county road and watched the storm for about 15-20 minutes. This shot is looking west. It was tornado warned at this time.
Then it started to get it's act together, developing a RFD cut. This shot looking westnorthwest.
All this time it had noticeable rotation, and a decent lowering from the updraft base. We saw an interesting looking "shear funnel" - I think thats what Derrick called it - For a while around this point we thought we might get luck and score a tornado, but it was just too dang high based! Dewpoints were at 45.
Then I had to get a shot of my "Chase vehicle" in there. Lightning was pretty intense for the first 15 minutes but gradually settled down, also indicating to us that the storm was weakening.
A nice looking RFD still. This is where I need a wide angle lens, you can't get a feeling of what it was like at 18mm. About this time we noticed a funnel across the base, where we weren't looking. Most likely this is what was called in as a tornado, which I guess is possible, since we were focusing our attention on what was rotating right in front of us. We could see it rotating, it quickly went back up though. Who knows, maybe it was a tornado, I hope someone posts an image of it on Stormtrack.
I tried to get some better structure shots, but we decided to ditch this cell and head to a recently tornado warned cell near Beatrice.
By the time we reached the Beatrice cell it had weakened considerably. Drove through some small hail on the way home and followed one of the most intense rainbows I have ever seen.
Overall a pretty exciting chase given the circumstances. Here is a map of our chase...
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