June 1, 2010 Eastern Nebraska HP Supercell
Really hard forecast this day was, or ended up being. None the less quick reaction time led us "the storm of the day" if you could call it that. More like the longest lasting storm of the day, started near Leigh, Nebraska and tracked well into Illinois I believe mainly as a bow echo. Anyway, spent most of the morning wait for Chris to get an oil change for his Jeep, didn't get on the road till 2:30p.m. We went just south of Omaha, planning on watching the cumulus near Hastings. However, after watching a few scans on radar we realized the storms of the day would be along the line of already ongoing storms just north of the platte river. Storms where exploding now and we raced north. A storm started turning right and became supercellular. We intercepted the storm on hwy 77 north of Winslow, Nebraska. It had some pretty cool structure, but was very HP (high precipitation). This storm also had the greenest core I have ever seen. It made for some cool images.
Here we were in the "whales mouth" or under the shelf cloud. It was obvious the storm was gusting out, as an outflow boundary was showing on radar. It still tried to wrap up just north of that occluded area. Actually I guess there was a large landspout just on the other side of that precip.
We followed the storm east as far as we could to the Missouri River, where we thought we were screwed by road options, but the storm took a huge right turn and was tracking southeast now and a new meso was forming on the southern edge of this "bow" it was going to pass just south of Blair, which happens to be one of the only Missouri river bridge crossings north of Omaha, the other being Decatur (35 miles north). So we got pretty lucky there. Storms were exploding further west now and I could tell it was going to be one huge line with Severe wind being the main threat, at this point I thought our tornado hopes were done. But check out that green core!!! unbelievable!
Really need a new camera body, in the image above you can see in the upper right there is a dark spot, that only shows up when at iso 800, which I needed to be at during this since it was so dark, in fact that shot is at F/4 and 1/25th of a second shutter speed, kinda the limit on hand held shots. Kind of annoying to not be able to hand hold shots at 5pm and have to worry about noise. Hopefully by next year I'll be able to afford a new body, and now that I don't need to worry about getting a video camera (thanks Mike!) I might be able to pull it off.
Now this storm is putting down CGs (cloud to ground lightning strikes) like mad every 30 seconds or so. And these things are CLOSE. Happening all around us. We book it south to Blair so we can cross the river on hwy 30. We get a little ways into Iowa while the CGs are still going insane, pull over and try to get some CGs with the storm structure. I was actually fairly successful! Just a few seconds after these shots below there was a Strike less than 50 yards I would guess, just behind us. We were standing outside the car shooting tripoded shots of the lightning. As soon as we saw the flash we knew it was one of the closest of the day, and when the thunder was less than a second after the lightning it was survival instinct to grab your crap and book it to shelter, which is what all of us did. I'm glad God was watching out for us that day. Definitely going to think twice about going far from the car during an insane lightning storm.
I'd guess we had at least 50 strikes within a mile or two, and at least half a dozen within a quarter mile. I've never seen a lightning storm like it in my life, it was amazing. It reminds me of a storm we had roll in back in 2003 I think that was just a constant loud rumble of thunder and flashes every few seconds, it was incredible, this I think topped that though, as we could see them all around us. It was a constant "holy crap that was close" fest lol. This lasted most of the day too, it wasn't just a few minutes that it was doing this, it lasted at least an hour then it settled down as we got further into Iowa.
This next one almost looks fake because the bolt is like a perfectly straight line lol, but I assure you it is real. Stopped in Missouri Valley to top off on gas and to get an Iowa map (I forgot to bring my US atlas, just brought the Nebraska Delorme with and Chris' GPS wasn't working for some reason... not that I trust that thing after 5/09/10 in Kansas lol). While there we were getting slammed by 40mph westerly gusts. We got on 29 south and got east on 680. Exited at minden and went a bit south to a hill to watch it come to us again. The inflow was insane a sustained 30mph wind with gusts to 45 out of the southeast. Rain curtains were very cool looking too, I got video of it, but don't think I'll get to post it anytime soon, as I don't have a firewire port on my laptop, so I may have to wait until I move to my parents in July.
The rest of the day in Iowa was mostly spent trying to get ahead of the bow echo in very heavy rain and 40-50mph winds. But soon we decided to give up and get south for other storms along the line, none of which ended up being very cool. Still a great local chase day! Greenest core I've ever seen and most intense lightning storm ever! Not to soon be forgotten. It was awesome to not have to drive 6 hours to get home after a chase!!
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