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Severe watch issued at noon for all of eastern NE. I'm on vacation and pondered heading to KS this day. I decided I'd had enough long distance busts for a while and stayed home. Not that KS is exactly long, but well....it's just starting to get that way this year. Ready for some of Nebraska's summer time southward moving supercells. Seems as though now through the end of July central NE gets a ton of them. Anyway, this is my 19th chase this year with basically nothing I can call a tornado yet. Hard to catch tornadoes when storms don't produce them. That severe watch was replaced with a tornado watch sometime around 5pm...maybe it was 4......I forget. Picked the Columbus area and left.
The first tornado warning came out for the Columbus storm as I was just north of Fremont. By the time I got there the cold outflow from the south had killed it and it was now very much an outflow dominant storm. I sat in the wind and rain of that storm waaayy too long before I decide to pull up radar. My jaw dropped once I did. There was a nice supercell over York Nebraska well to my sw. I had to stop and shoot this rainbow on my way there.
I'd drive by hills right off the road and it would appear infront of the hill. Notice the first picture.
I almost opted to go west before Seward and navigate to the back of the storm. Instead I decide to just punch the damn thing. Had I gone the other way I would not have seen this to my west as I pop out of the rain. This was rotating bigtime.
It was also being undercut from cooler air to its north. Those low level clouds are racing south on up into the updraft.
I pull over next to Steve Peterson about here. He of course, as usuall, was south of it before myself.
I'm still due east of it, looking west, as it drops sse.
Rotating and rotating.
Rotated into nothing. We tried to drop south, then west then south to stay ahead of it, but obviously it was dying. This is now looking ne.
We noticed some towers well north and gave them a shot. By the time we got there the western one was running into the rain cooled air and dying. Some very cool low level features were noted.
I sort of like this picture. It looks like waves in an ocean, as the sun is setting under the anvil from perhaps the best supercell of the day. We weren't aware of this until too late. It dropped south all by itself for a long time....heck it could still be going in KS right now for all I know. It produced 4.5 inch hail out by Kearney.
Well after looking at radar images I realised something. I had no idea that western supercell was there and that is what I would be on later. The on to its ne is the one I was on east of Columbus as it craps out.
Here is what I saw when I loaded a radar image in my car and what I drop south to catch-the sweet supercell west of Milford. This is a different supercell than the next image. Notice this is east of GRI(Grand Island). The next one is west of Grand Island.
This is 2 hours after that previous radar. It sucks thinking that we most likely could have caught this, somewhat easily, had we went right to it after seeing ours was getting so undercut. This is the one that drops 4.5 inch hail in Minden, se of Kearney. Hmmmm then again maybe it's a good thing we didn't. Minden is on highway 6, the highway we were on and would have taken west. We most likely would have been getting under it at about that time frame, maybe sooner. Oh well. That would have been 3 nice supercells on a day not expecting a chase at all.