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NIGHT SKY IMAGE SALES ABOUT CONTACT |
April 29, 2010: Chased solo without data yesterday. Got on 2 impressive supercells one west of Washington, KS, the other I intercepted at Fairbury, NE and followed to Nebraska city, NE. Structure made the day, which was mostly driving to stay ahead of these storms. I'll post more later, but here is one of the Washington, KS supercell.
Tomorrow is a possibility in Iowa, not sure I will be rested enough for it though, we'll see what the morning runs look like.
April 25, 2010: Chased on Friday in eastern Nebraska. Had a lot of trouble with initiation, I think the problem was lack of forcing, something I've now learned to watch for in the future. Cumulus looked perfect, nice and crisp, just had no forcing. Storms took forever to intensify until finally something went east of Beatrice. Storms go severe warned and we are a little out of position after going after some towers that died closer to the warmfront, so had to intercept from the northwest. Highlight of the day was coring the storms, saw at least dime sized hail, probably quarters. For the most part today busted as it looked to be a tornado producing day. More later.
April 14, 2010: Put a short page together explaining the last two chase days last week. Check it out on the 2010 chase reports page. Sunday night the KP index reached 6 and I went out hoping to see auroras, ended up wasting a ton of gas for nothing, trying to see cool stuff can be really annoying went it takes such a toll financially. Kinda glad that the rest of the month is looking crappy for chasing. Better to save money for the best setups in May and June.
April 8, 2010: Probably have 4 or 5 images I could throw together for the first two chases (busts really) of the season. Tuesday would have been a great day if the warm front hadn't drifted south, that initial storm that developed and moved north of the boundary would have gone insane I'm sure. What can you do I guess, except keep trying. Looks like our next possible day is Monday. Low pressure in SE Montana... lol, could be a chase in North Dakota! Still 120 hours out we'll see how it changes. For now here is another picture from Tuesday, this is that storm north of the warm front, near Waterloo, Iowa. Big RFD cutting in, soon after this we got tossed around in 50mph winds in there.
April 7, 2010: Just real quick here. Chased Monday in SE NE/NE KS... busted pretty bad, initiation occured at sunset, got on a tornado warned storm but it quickly died. Chased again Tuesday in East central Iowa, saw a supercell north of the warm front, had a nice RFD and some crazy motions, base was almost on the ground. Temp/dew spread at that time in Cedar rapids was 54/52. After seeing stuff go tornado warned to the south and not wanting to go into Wisconsin (only 20 miles away at this point) we raced south to intercept. Soon it looked worse and was no longer warned. About 40 minutes later it goes tornado warned again and we caught it just east of Central City, IA. Had a pretty low wall cloud as soon as we could see the updraft base, of course as soon as we get on this storm it craps out. Might post more later, I need to sleep, its 2am and I work at 6.
April 3, 2010: It appears chase season will begin on Monday. Both the NAM and GFS have been very consistent in putting 60F+ dew points along the dryline and warmfront from SC Nebraska south into Oklahoma along the dryline and East from SC Nebraska across southern Iowa into Illinois. Along these boundaries directional shear looks excellent, CAPE values look very good for this time of year, NAM showing near 3000 j/kg in NC Kansas. Right now looks like there are two possible targets, the first one being north central Kansas into southeast Nebraska near the triple point with the best CAPE and lifted Index near -10 according to 12z NAM. The downfall of this target is the warm mid level temps that could prevent initiation before dark. 700mb temps of 6-8c by 00z make me question any storms firing at all before dark. Thursday 700 temps were between 8-10c most of the day and storms didn't fire till just after sunset, so I think it might be able to break the cap with current forecasted Mid level temps.
The other target would be SE Iowa where hodographs are looking insane. Not quite as much instability in this area, but enough. The cap is quite a bit weaker east along the warmfront which makes initiation more of a sure bet. Still torn at this point as to where to target. So far neither model has broken out precip before 03z (10p.m. CST) It will be interesting to see if the WRF breaks out any precip, should be able to see it on tonights 00z runs as this setup is nearing 48 hours out. Anyway this was kinda my first "forecast blog" not sure how often I will do this, as I still am learning a lot about forecasting. But you can bet I'll be out chasing on Monday whether it be the triple point or warmfront in IA.
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