Seize the storm

Get to the Car - QUICK!

I was just getting off the computer when Amy told me to look out the window.  One look at the clouds and I was racing.  We hopped in the car and sped to the east to catch up and keep up with the front.  We saw some straight-line winds, gustnados, mammatus, and rainbows…with windmills!  I wish the pictures could do more justice to what we saw; it was absolutely gorgeous. 

Gnats!  (Nuts!)

The forecast was one of the greatest we’ve seen in a long time for South Dakota.  Parameters were on there way to outbreak level.  Amy and I picked up Nick Hartley and headed out to Sioux Falls where we filled up and sped west on I-90.  On our way, we found out that two tornadoes had dropped on the west side of the state near Allen.  Excited by the cap breaking, we continued on.  At Chamberlain, we found to our dismay that the cap was still too strong as system moved eastward.  After some consultation of radar, phone calls, and satellite imagery, we decided that the best move would be to head to our original target of Winner.  As we got close to Winner, we could make out cumulonimbus in the closing distance.  Again, our excitement heightened - Winner passed and the Baloo Mobile made its way towards Presho to get back on I-90.

Road to Presho

It was on this road to Presho that we encountered a beautiful shelf cloud.  It kicked up dust as its moisture-starved maw opened to take us in.  The straight-line winds buffeted the car and added difficulty to our route to the northwest.  We witnessed a pheasant attempt to face the straight-line winds only to be literally thrown backwards across the entire highway.  As we continued, we observed a lot of rotation that lacked organization.  There were a few gustnadoes that we saw in the distance but couldn’t get any pictures because we were too far away.

Going Home

At I-90, we fell behind Tim Samaras and his entourage, following them until Chamberlain where we filled up again and decided to persue a cell headed toward Huron.  The cell looked good for a little while but then lost all of its energy leaving a damp road ahead of us.  It was just south of Huron that I noticed this noise that sounded like rain.  After a moment of looking and trying to find the clouds, I found the supercell cumulonimbus cloud of gnats we were driving through.  It wasn’t until Huron when we filled up one more time that we saw the carnage that was the front of my car.  I daresay I laid waste to a couple of hundred thousand gnats as I could barely read my license plate.

The gnat picture…(of course I took a picture)

The Road Runner and Me

Around noon, I saw that the cloud deck in Nebraska was eroding and would allow for a little more heating to occur.  With cells firing already in NE, I decided the strategy would be to go down to the SD border by Yankton and wait for them to come across the border.  I gave Nick Hartley a call and he climbed into the Baloo Mobile as the important navigator, data analyzer, and the ever important - second pair of eyes.  We finally got onto the first cell and had a wonderful view on a hilltop.  The wonderful view lasted for about a minute - enough to snap two pictures and then think about what to do next.  By this time, the storm was gone, racing northward and away from us at 40-60 mph.  The next cell coming out of Nebraska looked awesome as the hook echo on the first was starting to fade.  We opted to stay behind, entrenching ourselves on the west side of the storm - the big and only mistake of the chase.

We watched and waited as the storm slowly drifted north.  We captured some pretty good pictures of a rotating wall cloud and supposed funnel.  I am always overly second guessing myself as to what I see and if it’s scud or something meaningful.  The plan was to let the storm pass and then head east to get behind it.  Sadly, there were some developing storms on the south side that kept us wondering if the storm was back-building.  We attempted to head east but recoiled due to heavy rain and low visibility - we weren’t about to throw ourselves headlong into a situation we weren’t prepared for.  Our data connection was spotty but even worse was the fact that the radar was already too old by the time we got it.  The storms had already moved at least 5-10 miles to the north as we got each new radar grab.

Finally, we got behind the storm but were racing to catch up with it.  I definitely felt like Wile E. Coyote on the rocket trying to keep up with the Road Runner.  We kept pursuing but could not grasp the prey.  A report would come over the radio of a tornado sited at this town and literally 5 minutes later, we would see a sign for that town.  Though we were going at least 20 mph faster than the storm, we could not keep up.  When it seemed like we were on the storm, a report came that it was still north of us.  After the chase, I could not believe Bill Doms’ pictures as we were right there, but saw nothing.  It was all about position and we had chosen the wrong point of entry into the chase.  All the way north, we were right behind it - Utica, Freeman, Bridgewater, Salem, Canova, Howard, Carthage, De Smet.  Looking back, I still think we might have been too far east.  Fortunately, we didn’t see much damage along the path that we did take.  We returned a frustrated bunch but grateful at least that there were tornadoes out there and it wasn’t a total bust.