July 9, 2020 Storms

Nebraska Panhandle

The Day 2 storms that we were hoping to chase by not going to Minnesota on July 8 made for a reasonably interesting chase at times. We initially set a target in the middle of the Nebraska panhandle. However, storms appeared to struggle quite a bit. There were a lot of small cells, and they were mostly rather high-based without any strong, dominant cells. When a cell would appear to intensify on radar, it would then quickly lose its strength. We decided to go west to Alliance to get some cells moving off the higher terrain.

When we got there, we still had a fair bit of a multicellular mess. We saw a more isolated storm in northern Colorado and began to head south to intercept it, but then a strong cell developed immediately to our west. Since it was getting somewhat late in the day, and we would barely reach the Colorado cell before sunset (and its persistence was rather in doubt) we decided to play with what we had nearby, even though it was not particularly isolated. We parked along a dirt road and watched as the cell split. We hoped the southern cell would become the stronger one, but the wind shear was not great for right-moving storms, and the northward (left) moving storm became dominant. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, so that's what we did.

We followed the northern cell and ended up on a road option that took us rather close to the base. It also became warned with a risk for golfball size hail. This we could verify. It one point, we needed to take an east option, but the fast-moving split was moving rather quickly, and it was a bit of a squeeze to get by without getting hail damage. As it was, we had sun-illuminated hailstones falling around us, but none hit the vans. They were quite widely separated. We had to zig-zag a bit on the sandy roads, just ahead of this hail core, but we made it back to a paved road and were able to blast southeast ahead of the storm. It weakened once we got ahead of it. In fact, it had been shrinking already when we were quite close to it.

We pulled over along a dirt road at Lewellen, NE and enjoyed taking sunset and rainbow pictures. The photography group decided to stay there and take a few more pictures, but I took my van back to Ogallala. I was getting tired and a bit hungry. The restaurants were all closed by the time we arrived at the hotel, so I grabbed some convenience store food.

The storms develop in the Nebraska panhandle.

A rainbow at Lewellen, NE.

A beautiful sunset at Lewellen, NE.

441 Miles of driving.

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