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Well I almost didn't chase this day. I wish I hadn't. I'm only including the part from the chase because it was very weakly interesting with the split of a very tiny storm. There was a meso low out near North Platte that finally got me out the door around 3:30. This was a very late leave for something that far west, but it was really bugging me. It was spinning nicely on satellite and looked to have a storm go up at it within an hour or so. Well I get out to Grand Island and a new area starts to fire se of the area I had been going for. This area was just sw of the city. So I head south through Hastings. The dewpoints were really crappy down here away from the stronger pooling back to the nw. Well here is what happens when you have nice shear but poor moisture. Mid-level flow was wnw with nw flow in the upper levels. Low leve flow was pretty weak. If it is very elevated it can't grab the boundary layer as much and have some chance at turning right. So this is what happens....over and over and over in 2006 that I've seen. This road goes west so I'm looking wsw at this storm. The anvil is blowing to the southeast, as is the precipitation. The high based storm is moving almost straight east. This simply never works. You can count on your already pathetic base getting smaller as it does so. The updraft and base is being pushed right into the precip cooled air.
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The storm was barely on radar but did have a fair amount of the thunder with it at this time. This image is from the same spot as the first image. I'm looking nw here at this left split coming off the storm. As this happens it will help push the right split more to the right, in this case to the se. Seeing the split didn't raise my hopes much seeings how the right split still had crap air to use and would need to turn almost due south to be worth a darn.
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For the hell of it I drive west, back into Red Cloud and then drop south into northern KS. I'm now looking ne. You can see that left split in the background moving away. And in the foreground is my storm being blown into its precip. If there is weak inflow and your storm is moving towards its precip you can watch your base slowly getting smaller and smaller until it is gone. The storm gets chopped off from the bottom up. On the fairly long drive home I got to watch this turn into nothing but an anvil. Splitting storms are pretty cool, but in this case it was very uncool. Perhaps things would have gone better had something formed closer to the meso low.
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Most of the drive home I could see towers to the north. As I got to Lincoln I could see they were rather electified, even though they weren't much at all on radar. They were also training just north of my hometown. I thought geee that would have been nice had I stayed home and just sat out on my parent's porch and shot lightning. As I get closer I noticed most of the lightning is in-cloud. It didn't look worth bothering with. Finally after being home for a while I get bored and head out to check them out. I've been wanting to use my parents front porch for close lightning, since it is covered, but I didn't want to get the dogs barking and wake them up. I decided to try it anyway, since I was told it would be fine(even if it was 1 a.m. now). These were almost in town now so I hurried out there. On the way I try to find the mount for the tripod...no luck! So much for that idea. I hadn't been able to check out the lightning yet anyway so I look for a spot around town that I could see the horizon. I wind up north of town just in time to get into sprinkles(which don't work with a camera mounted to a car window). I then head back into town and notice this very cool looking base starting to be lit up by the city lights. I hurried into town while setting up the camera so it would be ready to go. Right as I get into town I think of the highschool parking lot and if maybe it would work well. Before getting to it I see the open area at the youth sports complex. I pull over and shoot stills there for the next hour plus. Base after base would go by and I'd really never get into any precip from them. It was pretty fun but there were very few bolts coming down. So I decide to shoot for the sky only and not care so much if a rare bolt comes down and blows out a bit.
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Hey what do you know, a cg.....grrr. The clouds were moving so in order for them to not blur the apperature had to be wide open. I'm pretty sure this was one of the ISO 100 shots so the ISO speed wasn't what blew out the bolt. If I stopped the lens down to F11 or more the bolt would have been fine, but the sky would have been blurry. It wasn't that I didn't want any blurry skies as much as it was the fact there were very few cg bolts happening.
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Probably the other cg of the night. Then again there were a lot of bright flashes in that area without seeing a bolt.
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Longer exposure of the clouds blowing over the trees. |
