June 17, 2009 Odell, Nebraska tornadic supercell
This day I will never forget. I had been watching the models for about a week prior to this day, and it looked amazing from the start. Got up early and checked the obs, soon left to meet up with Chris Allington in Papillion. Actually we met at Derrick Herndon's house, because we were going to stay together, but due to being late to hit the road, Derrick just told us to head out and we'll meet at our target which was hastings. Once on the road we saw the storm that went up near the Kansas border (it was 11am and a storm had already fired, we weren't that happy about it.)
After watching it for a bit on GRlevel3 and noticing it was developing some rotation, we decided to check it out, and then just take a highway west to our target instead of the interstate. After losing data south of beatrice we could start to see a lowering in the base, and thats when I knew this thing was going to be a beast. In fact the first time we stopped, there was a funnel and possibly a tornado. In this first image its a little after the funnel, but you can see the lowering in front of the precip on the right side of the base.
We kept going south to get a little closer and ahead of its track, which was ESE I believe. We sat on this hill for probably 10 minutes as it approached. Odell, Nebraska is 2 miles down that road there. The fire department from town pulled off the road behind us and watched this amazing meso try to drop a tornado to the right there. (apparently it did drop something, but we couldn't see it, which is understandable since there were a lot of hills in this area.) I'm pretty surprised it didn't drop one where we could see, there was very rapid rotation. Also by this time I'm freaking out that this is so crazy lol. I've never seen something with structure like this, except online.
Here is one at full 10mm, so its real close now, I'm surprised we didn't get any hail.
road options got a little crazy, so no images for about 15 minutes. Now we are near Oketo, Kansas. It just gets better and better! keep in mind this whole thing is rotating, just spinning like a top. This was probably more scary than the tornado in Aurora. we stayed here and basically let it overtake us after we had no paved road options.
It was just a perfect scene with the wheat field. If you look close you can notice a blur in the wheat, due to the wind and I was stopped down to f/16. Contrast was just nuts, this is not edited in any way other than the white balance through RAW conversion. It's stuff like this that makes me want a video camera, rotation would have been insane on film. I wonder if any chasers got this on film.
What a storm!
We watched it try to form a new meso on the back side, but it never made it. That was when the TIV passed us, which gave us hope that the storm might be cycling and becoming stronger, but we couldn't find out ourselves since we lost data. So we played catchup, but it never looked as impressive.
We got gas in Seneca which sucked because they lost power and they had to do it all manually. We were at that station for probably 25 minutes. I got to talk to a chaser from Ohio while we waited, which was kind of fun. I was anxious to get back west for the new development. At this point its already a successful chase! I called Derrick and he said they were seeing a cu field, so we booked it west to Maryville, KS where we stopped for a quick lunch at 4:45p.m. This was the smallest taco bell I've ever seen lol. This is also where Chris realized he left his credit card back in Seneca, so he had to call his wife to cancel it. Dang good thing we didn't go back for it.
Click here for images of the Aurora storm and Tornado
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