May 24 2008 Nebraska

Posted by Rich

With the three day weekend coming up, and not being able to make it out once yet, Decided to head to NE where things looked pretty good for some tornadoes. Not as good as the previous couple of days, but still a decent chance. Talked Max and Mandy into it, and got going about 6am Saturday morning with an initial target of Lincoln. A really cold drive, lower 50′s with a lot of wind all the way down.

We set up slightly south of Lincoln and caught some lunch in one of the local parks down there. Decided after watching the temps and dp’s creeping up to our west that we may have to adjust our target. Starting to see some precip break out to our NW so we started in that direction. Line slowly built to the south so we were able to get on a couple of those cells. Saw a nice wall cloud. Didn’t have very many opportunities to stop and take pictures as it kept sliding to the ne over the top of us. We’d have to drive north through the core, then east ahead of it just to keep up. Must have punched that core about 5 times that day. Luckily only pea size hail. In the end it was a pretty nice wall cloud, very obviously feeding off the rain core ahead of it. I suspect just too much wind on the ground for it to produce anything though.

Ran by the Tiv, Dow, and their entourage, what a circus that is. Reminds of the black vans on twister. They stopped and set up to look at the same wall we were chasing. No way they could have caught up after that. And I thought it was illegal to drive with the lightbars going? They’re group didn’t seem to have a problem doing it.

Also ran across another group, I thought it may have been the Tamu guys, another bunch of trailers and big pickups with all kinds of gear they were going to deploy. The equipment in the back of the pickups looked like survey tripods with anonometers on top. Pretty sure the first initial was T on the side of the trucks.

Pretty sure we chased the line up to Norfolk, then gave up as the cells were collapsing at that point. Our’s still had a wall cloud on it, not sure how, because it was obvious that the top was collapsing big time at that point. Headed for Sioux Falls to set up for the Iowa chase on Sunday.