Most of the shots that aren't obviously telephoto were taken at 17mm, so everything seems a lot farther away than it is. Now, without further ado, here we go:
I started out from Lincoln at around 11AM, arriving at my Kearney waylay at 1PM. I have family in Kearney, so it was double the fun -- got to wish mom, who is, by the way, the best mom in the charted universe, a happy premature mum's day AND get data.
In Kearney, I sat around watching storms pop way out west:
I wasn't willing to drive that far, so I sat around hoping something would pop closer to home (there was a vort max coming out of Colorado). In the end, it was a boundary -- not sure if it was a dry punch -- from northcentral Kansas into southcentral Nebraska that got my attention. Sure enough, the line of cu started initiating at around 2:30PM, and it was off to the races.
I jetted down I-80 west to Hwy 183, which I took south towards Holdrege. I stayed generally east of the north-south boundary. There were two storms, a northern that was trying to fire and a southern that had already gotten a bit cranked up. After pulling down a dirt road and looking at the northern storm (while getting hailed on with peas), I decided that the northern storm was a goner -- looks like it was getting undercut by outflow from the storm to the south.
The southern storm was pretty highbased and I didn't have a lot of hope for it, but it was all that was around, so I jotted the rest of the way down 183 until I arrived in Holdrege. Here I am headed south, about 5 or 6 miles outta town. You can see a wall cloud from here:
Now, Holderege was a mess. Not the town, but the storm -- man, that thing looked like it was about to smash the heck outta Holderege, and the locals were all out in their yards looking up with that unique midwestern mix of curiosity and terror of what God's got in store THIS time. There was a very distinct, large, and furiously rotating lowering on the southeast edge of the storm which, at this point, was directly to the south-southwest of me. I got about as close to it as I dared, then pulled over into turnoff next to a railroad crossing and watched the thing unfold.
The wall cloud:
The storm crossed to the south of me moving northeast. Eventually, it got east of me. I was about a mile away from the rotating wall cloud, which, at this point, looked downright scary -- the edges of the wallcloud had what I can best describe as upward-moving "teeth" that rotated around and around as the thing twisted. I decided to reposition so that I could get behind it after it got north of me a bit. Suddenly a HUGE cloud of dirt rose about 500 or 600 feet into the air about a mile east of me. I never saw a funnel, but the cloud, which was about half a mile wide, moved with the storm. I can only surmise that this was a tornado on the ground:
I then repositioned, as the cloud moved behinds some trees:
Here is a close-up:
The tornado only missed Holdrege by maybe a mile. The sirens didn't start going off until after the touchdown -- I'm guessing they didn't get much lead-time on this one. The doppler indicated tornado warning was issued at about the same time the sirens went off.
So, of course, after calling 911 I manage to misplace my cellphone, which is kinda important for getting radar data, so I spend four precious minutes tearing apart my car until I find it.
After this, I head east down Hwy 6 towards Funk. The tornado seemed to have lifted and then -- lo and behold -- another ground dirt swirl forms, crosses the highway about a mile in front of me, and then proceeds to follow the storm for about five minutes as it moves east:
The NWS report says this damaged a shed and turned a pivot.
What's interesting is that periodically, smaller dust swirls would form around the main dust swirl. While one dust swirl was churning away, another smaller one fired up maybe a quarter mile from it. I sat still for about 15 minutes snapping pictures of the storm moving off, and then took off east again (given that I never saw funnels out of this one, I was very hesitant to pass the storm until the lowering was well in the distance).
On my way east, I caught up with and followed for a bit a "Weather Channel" car. What's up with that? They have chase cars?!
What gets me is that not only did they have a chase car, they had a white and blue strobe lightbar running. People were actually pulling off the road to let the friggin' Weather Channel chasecar pass. And it wasn't just some jackass pretending to be the Weather Channel, either, unless they went through all the trouble of painting two foot wide WC logos on the sides of their car.
I turned north on Hwy44 just after Axtell to try to catch up with the circulation again. Here I am behind ol' WC, and passing a chaser in a red SUV parked on the side of the road:
After a bit, I caught sight of the wall cloud again. It was still cranking pretty good, but no tornado:
After a bit it wrapped up for a while in rain. 44 runs back into I-80, at which point I pointed the car east towards the circulation, which was maybe three miles east. I stopped on the side of the interstate (well off the shoulder) and filmed another large dust cloud form and rise up 400 or 500 feet in the air. This dust cloud did not appear to be rotating to me, so maybe it was the RFD? You make the call!
It looked like a tornadic circulation and behaved like one and sat under the part of the storm that indicated a hook-echo on radar... and the giant dust swirl actually tracked off into the distance with the storm, continually changing shape, shrinking, growing, etc. As I took off east again, rain wrapped around it, but to my naked eye, I could swear I could see what appeared to be large stovepipe maybe 4 miles in the distance in the general direction the dustswirl was moving.
After that, I broke off and headed to Lincoln because of the 8PM time constraint. My parents called me from Kearney -- apparently they got golfball and larger hail there that was a good inch or two deep -- they said it looked like winter outside. It was large enough to damage parked cars. I had them take pics of the "hail fog" that formed afterwards. Here are two pictures my little sister took in our backyard:
All in all, great chase day for a marginal setup. Got within a mile and a half of a tornadic ground circulation and tracked the parent storm for 20 miles. Looks like tomorrow might be fun, too. I hope this is an omen of the season to come!
-Ryan
http://backingwinds.blogspot.com
