False Alarm

We woke up yesterday in the panhandle of the Sooner State, bright and early. Our goal was to head for western Kansas and head into eastern Colorado at the furthest. We figured that with the highest chance of our trip yet for tornadoes, at 10%, that there would be many other chase groups, and of course yahoos. Yahoos, not the website, rather inexperienced and dangerous locals who roach, or follow experienced chasers towards storms, can be hazardous to not only us, but they can give us, the experienced or student chasers a bad rep.
As we left Oklahoma, we passed into Kansas and after eating lunch in Colby, near the northwestern corner, we stopped at a local motel and borrowed their wireless internet services. We sat there, hoping for storms to form to our west and come in our direction. The "cap" prevented this from happening. Unfortunately for us, storms did fire in Wyoming, and Vortex 2 spotted a decent tornado that lasted 24 minutes. The same cell was tracking east, and with little choices to make in Kansas, we decided to head north, after wasting a vast amount of precious time sitting in that motel parking lot. To intercept, we would have to travel over three hours and flirt with the time zone that separates the mountain and central zones. Coming up on 5 o'clock, we hadn’t seen a rain shaft, few clouds with little or no vertical development, and basically, nothing in favor of us chasing. The day looked like it was going to be a waste of gas, miles, and a huge bust. But, defying all odds against us, we tracked north to the supercells that had a history of producing tornadoes in hopes they might give us, as well as Vortex 2, a chance to see a tornado.
After crossing through 3 states and across the time zone boundary several times, we finally ended up near the southwestern Nebraska border, in Julesburg, CO. The cells were north and west of our position in Bridgeport, NE, moving slow to the east south east. For a day that looked to be the best day possibly of our trip, things were looking bleak. It was nearing 6 and we were just beginning the chase on a storm, for all that we knew could fizzle out and die as we approached from the south.

We decided that our best plan of action was to head for Oshkosh and wait for the storm to come to us, because the road network would limit us to just a few areas to intercept. WE headed down a hilly, and winding country road with the storm, also carrying with it a tornado warning, above and in front of us. The mammatus clouds were crazy compared to what we had seen earlier in the week, and the contrast on the horizon with the low level clouds was phenomenal. Just then, as we headed over some hills, both vans caught sight of an ominous wall cloud in the distance, against an orange sky. VIEW VIDEO:

Within seconds, the cloud appeared to drop a funnel, and the energy level in the van skyrocketed. It was hard to judge the ground level with the hills we were going through, but a cone shaped cloud dropped towards the ground only 15 miles to our north. I had been recording on the video camera the telecommunications department had loaned me, but I also quickly grabbed a hold of my other camera which had video capability and caught the reaction of the van I was in when the cloud appeared to stir up dust on the ground below it. I will take some of the blame for calling it a tornado, but the vast majority of us believed the same thing. There were also 2 other funnel shaped clouds nearby that were dropping out of the low cloud base. Could there be a tornado dropping, or even more than one? We rounded a corner and spotted another girl sitting in a gravel lot near a communications tower, and we parked near her, being it held a great viewpoint over Oshkosh and to where our funnel had just began to vanish, along with all of our hopes. After asking her if she had seen a tornado, she said, “No, but it definitely looked like a funnel perhaps.” It was slightly disheartening, but it was one step closer to our ultimate goal.

We snapped great photos and videos from our vantage point, and also caught a great lightning show. The Vortex group also drove by as well as numerous other chasing groups and individuals. When we finally left our storm, late last night, we passed it seemed, 100 other cars parked along the same road as us, just watching and hoping that the storm would produce, but it did not. We ate dinner at Subway, for the God knows what time this trip at a gas station off of I-80 at 11 last night. The Vortex team, a chase group from Texas Tech, and another DOW from NBC stopped to refuel and wind down at the same station. After dinner, we waited out for the remnants of our storm to move east and away from the highway, because at that time it was dropping softball sized hail. If we wouldn’t have waited, our trip would have been quickly ended with the destruction of our vans. We did not pull into our hotel until half past one this morning, and didn’t get to sleep until somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.

This morning we woke up a bit late, for obvious reasons, and headed out to Lincoln for lunch and now we are camped out at a Phillips 66 gas station waiting for storms to pop up in the area. Vincennes University and the National Severe Storms Laboratory are also here, as well as many other groups here in Nebraska City, just south and east of Lincoln near the border of Missouri and Iowa. I’m going to try to add more videos to this page and other earlier posts. I forgot that you could do this, so now you can enjoy some real storm chasing action. Comments are always appreciated, and you can contact me at btmaushart@bsu.edu. Thanks for reading.