Nebraska Chase

August 20th

Sean McMullen and I chased a storm from the Albion area all the way SSE towards the Central City area. Upon initiation, it looked like the storm was going to remain isolated and track East-South-East into an atmosphere more prone to tornadoes. However, about the time the storm was getting going convection also formed to the East of the storm. In this case, more convection was bad news, as the new convection to the East was ruining the once very unstable atmosphere due to the cold downdrafts (outflow) left by the passing storms. This caused our storm to begin to drop almost due south as opposed to SE and made it very tough for the storm to get its act together, for a short amount of time it looked OK near and just south of Fullerton, however it was very brief and it soon began to die completely near Central City. Had convection both to the south and the east of this storm not developed it could have become quite the storm, parameters in the area were outragous; CAPES >7000j/kg, Sig Torn 7, and a hail parameter of 6.

Powerfull updraft just not very big or organized.

In closer under the updraft.

Some sort of cut in there tightend things up and made it interesting for a short period of time.

Looking better then it had all day, also the first time all day that the storm had any sort of Surface winds to utilize, gusting out of the South at about 15kts.

If I had any hope for the storm I lost it all as I watched it begin to get undercut here.

Pretty powerfull looking downdraft.

It was neat to watch it transition as it went from the picture above to this in about 5 minutes.

Pretty much all but gone.