5/30 - 11:30am CDT - A Scary Day Yesterday, Off to Denver

After waiting around at a truck stop yesterday for the storms to form during the HIGH risk, Todd (leader of the tour group) noticed that the winds in Nebraska were not shifting east like they were supposed to. This shift was needed so that the advertised tornado outbreak would happen. A cell formed to our west after about an hour at the stop, so we began to chase it with little expectation of a tornado since the winds were not shifting eastward. Once we caught up with the wall cloud, this is what we saw:

This was the eeriest wall cloud anyone on the tour had seen. It had a very prominent rotation to it and it looked like it was ready to fire off a funnel cloud. We had to leave after about five minutes since the mesocyclone looked ready to drop a funnel in our direction. We had to go around the south and east of the storm since it cut off access to the north road. When we finally came back to intercept it again, it had gone from a super cell to a linear wind-driven mess. It was moving about as fast as we were and that made things scary when we tried to outrun it. We were heading north with dozens of other chaser vans in a sort of "escape parade" when the storm nearly caught up to us. We weren't entirely sure what was inside the core of the storm, especially since there were power flashes on the ground (tell-tale sign of a tornado) and reports of funnels. The radar showed no rotation and just a straight line wind situation, which in itself could harbor winds of over 100mph. Here's a picture of that monster heading toward us:

We finally were able to outrun it by going east. We stopped to look at it in the driving rain, when I spotted a funnel. It didn't last long, but it was a finger-like protrusion that was bouncing around in one of the lower cloud bases. I wasn't able to take a photo of it, but I captured it with my video camera. I'll be sure to edit all my video footage and post it when I come back to Louisville.

After seeing the speed that it was going and the possible hail that the storm have been putting down, we aborted chasing this one for our own safety. We drove west on I-80 for a while and saw some of the destruction the storm left in its path. Barns were completely destroyed and houses had some minor damage done to them. Trees were also stripped of their leaves and branches were scattered. The debris was all scattered in one direction, so it looked like straight line winds were the culprit. It was hard to tell though since there were so many reports of tornadoes in the area. That storm really wasn't the type that should have put down a tornado, but stranger things have happened.

We then punched through a line of storms to see some lightning on the other side at night just south of the Nebraska border in Kansas. It was quite an active line with lots of hail and lightning. Todd managed to manuver us in between the hail cores as we punched through, but just barely. A 5 minute delay in our travels would have meant a new windsheild for all three SUVs. We then stopped and took pictures of the beautiful storm structure and the lightning. This was my best shot:

After a good night's rest, we're going to Denver, CO since there's no good storms in this part of the country. We'll be visiting the Denver Zoo for fun. Tomorrow is when tour 4 ends and the guests go home. New guests will be arriving tomorrow and tour 5 will start on Sunday morning. It has been a pleasure meeting and getting to know all the people on tour 4 and I hope this blog has been a good resource for family members to keep up with what we're doing.

Next week looks interesting!