July 8, 2019 Storms

Central North Dakota

We drove eastward from Miles City, Montana in the morning to catch an eastward-moving cold front in North Dakota. There was a reasonably good chance for tornadoes should discrete storms develop, but the storms developed early and lined out fast. We were initially excited when the first echoes popped up on radar, but there were too many, and they quickly merged to form a large cold pool. The initial line of storms moved east-northeast at a modest pace, and a smaller LP storm developed along the southwestern end of the outflow boundary from these storms.

We stopped at Richardton, North Dakota to watch this LP storm move toward us. We had a great view, and I set up a time laps with my video camera. Unfortunately, operator error occurred, and I didn't get most of the time lapse. The storm also began to weaken as it approached, and the outflow boundary began to sag farther south ahead of our storm, anyway, as new cells developed ahead of our storm.

First radar echoes looked promising, but the storms soon lined out.

An LP storm approaches. It looks pretty promising for a good chase.

The storm gets a bit closer and starts to weaken.

There's some interesting structure as the updraft base gets left behind the outflow boundary.

We drove east to get back ahead of the outflow boundary. With any major line of storms, this takes a long time if it's even possible. Fortunately, we had the interstate and were able to go 75 mph due east, so we got back ahead of the line. There were some interesting cells to the northeast, but as we got into position to move north toward them, they weakened. We finally decided to set up near Ashtabula to watch the line come at us. It was about as non-photogenic as possible. We drove east to Fargo to grab dinner at Applebee's and stay the night. The line caught up to us at dinner and began to flood the town, making it a little more difficult to get to our hotel.

Shelf cloud on the storm near Ashtabula.

Our route for the day. 476 miles.

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