June 7th

South-East NE & MO

Sunday was a fun little chase, other than there being hordes of chasers once again. It was nice to have something in my backyard, though by the end I ended up further away than I had hoped. Started the day down around Seneca where I met up with fellow chasers, Greg Guise, Terry Schenk, Jeff and Kathryn Piotrowski along with Brian Piotrowski. While sitting along the side of the road under a thick cloud deck, I noted some echo tops rapidly coming up just the the WNW. In order to position ourselves for a good intercept on whichever storm took off, we moved North towards Auburn. There we ran into many of the Vortex 2 vehicles and in order to get out of that mess we stopped just West of town. I continued to watch the initial storm grow. I opted to race SW and intercept the storm just West of Pawnee City. I managed to cut JUST in front of the core and avoid the baseballs falling in that region, the rest of the group I believe ended up running into some hail just NW of Pawnee City. I watched an unorganized meso struggle for a while; meanwhile I kept my attention to a new STOUT updraft just to my East.

First storm photos…

Just rolling up on the storm West of Pawnee City.

Decent structure, but you can only give a storm so long before you realize it's not going to do much more than it already has.

At this point I moved well East of the storm, as I was splitting the difference between the first one and the one now growing to my SE.

Kept keeping an eye over my shoulder...

Through radio discussions between the group, which now included Sean and Katie McMullen the general consensus became that the best storm to be on was the one to our SE, though everyone broke off for that storm at different times. Lucky for me I made the decision just ahead of the mass transit of chasers, and I was in the middle of our group with both Jeff and Kathryn as well as Terry and Gregg ahead of me, which would prove valuable as I could use them to gauge what ended up being MONSTER hail, thanks to them I avoided an expensive deductible. On the way to Rulo (where I caught up to the storm) the updraft was extremely impressive, so much so that I didn’t have time to stop and take pictures as I wanted to be under it. I could tell visually that there had to be some big hail falling, sure enough after crossing the river Jeff (about 3 miles ahead of me) started mentioning sporadic golf balls, and then Baseballs, and then softballs. At that point I was just getting some marbles and heavy rain, though I knew if I kept going that would change, so I backed down to the same speed at which the storm was traveling. About that time Jeff started talking about how the storm looked prime to produce, so I pushed forward a little bit more, and the rain let up; I knew that wasn’t good, as I was still right under the updraft, sure enough I started to get very very sporadic baseballs falling just as I turned South on 111, at that point Greg and Terry told me they were exiting the hail about 5 miles down the road, so I knew the core of the monster stuff was within that 5 miles, I just kept a reasonable speed and stayed RIGHT behind it (I’m still being overly careful as my car is still essentially brand new), I managed to avoid the sporadic stuff except for one that got the top of my car, sounded real bad but really not that big of a dent. Just NW of Oregon was where the biggest stones were, many were softballs some likely larger, I pulled over and grabbed the first two I seen, didn’t want to hunt around as 1) there was still some falling and 2) I wanted to get ahead of the storm. In hindsight I wish I would have hunted around for some of the big pieces, and documented some of the damage. Eventually I got ahead of the storm and followed it into NW MO, where it almost produced twice, in fact there was a reported rain wrapped tornado, though that report is false, I sampled the rain-wrapped meso S of Maysville and it was nothing more than wrapping rain curtains…

Video Grabs of the hail, I only spent about 10 sec outside of the vehicle, wish I would have hunted down some bigger ones...

Breif video as I pass through Oregon, there were still baseballs flying but very very sporadic, I tailed the major stuff the best I could...

Closer to Maysville the storm again tried to tornado, I shot video of a rapidly rotating wall cloud and severeal needle funnels...

It was reported that there was a rain-wrapped tornado, though I know that not to be true, as I investigated the meso, BIG RFD with wrapping rain curtains, Yes; but tornado, No.

Then on my way home I saw new storms forming to my West, I again intercepted tornado warned storms near Hiawatha KS, I did see a breif funnel but not much else other than a ton of lightning...