We left North Platte, NE at 11AM to head into Wyoming to catch storms firing off the mountains. They promised to be nice low-precipitation storms with beautiful structure. Unfortunately, that didn’t totally pan out, but they were still amazing. First, though, the intrepid members of Probe 2!
We arrived at a hilltop and ended up staying there well over an hour, watching the bases of two cells pass by us. Below is one of my favorite images from the first storm – a wall cloud under the rain-free base, and blue sky outside the storm. Very nice to have isolated cells!
While up there, we saw what appeared to be a very brief elephant trunk tornado. Unfortunately, it appears that it may not have been; spotters closer to the event say that the dust column was not rotating as we believed it to be.
We eventually fled south as the second storm drew closer, and saw some nice storm features on our way.
Once we dropped south a ways, some of the chasers in our group thought they saw a cone tornado embedded in the rain of the more northern cell. I’ve really overcooked this image to bring out detail, and I’m pretty convinced that it’s a rain shaft.
We repositioned again after watching that for a moment, and were treated with a beautiful striated, ground-scraping wall cloud over a nearby mesa. This cell was not tornado warned at the time; perhaps the rotation was (literally) under the radar. I tried calling it in on the local SKYWARN frequency, but I couldn’t hit the repeater with my radio.
We capped the night off with a wonderful lightning show and sunset. Grabbed this photo of a lightning bolt next to the sun peeking through the rain – probably my best lightning image yet!
After waving goodbye to the storm, we headed to Kimball, NE for the night. It looks like today we’ll be somewhere in Colorado. Mid-level winds are mediocre at best, so today will probably echo of 2013 – running away from lines of storms.
We’ll see!
Giving Chase 