I can has Tornado?!?

Video of the tornado as it moved out of the rain a bit for our first great view

Okay, so reallllllyy fast recap of what we did the day before, then the fun stuff :-)

On the 4th we intercepted supercells near Cheyenne, Wyoming, which were pretty cool, but didn't produce any tornadoes. It did have a nice shape to it though, and it dropped a LOT of hail on I80 -- but we were too far ahead of it to see that part. That's it...because the next day was WAYYYY better.

On the 5th we moved into Nebraska, and then into Wyoming again to play the upslope potential. As we pushed westward, three storms were firing up in eastern WY, only two of which were within reason for us to intercept. Lucky for us, the southern-most storm began to evolve into a supercell, exactly what we were looking for. With conditions better for tornadoes that day than almost any other day we've had this project, spirits were tentatively hopeful. When we saw the wall cloud that the storm had produced, we became a LOT more hopeful:

Distant view of the updraft -- it certainly looked mighty good

Our probes first assignment was to go north and sample the forward flank downdraft, which is an area of typically 'calmer' weather, which for this storm meant occasional torrential rain and hail up to golf ball sizes. We did one big pass to the west, and turned around when we saw a beautiful updraft feature on the backside of the storm:

The updraft from N/NW of the storm -- this gave us good hope that this storm would produce something special

After this, we booked it eastward knowing that the storm was quite likely to produce a tornado at any moment, and we needed to complete our storm-relative mission of sampling the inflow just ahead of the tornado, and the gust front features to the northeast relative to the tornado. It also happens that this position allows for OUTSTANDING views of the tornado, not to mention from really up close. We began our transects on a NE/SW highway, and we were able to pass back and forth in front of the circulation 4-6 times before finally bailing out to the north. This gave us a view of the tornado that was truly spectacular:

The tornado from a distance -- this was our first view of it and we couldn't really tell if it was on the ground

This was from our transects -- beautiful tornado possibly into the EF-3 range

The view as the tornado was working in and out of rain bands

A bit closer -- this was the best vortex shape we saw -- after this it began to lose some strength

Our last pass to the north -- this was as the tornado dropped south and roped out

After making our several transects, we made our final transect northward knowing that we would both sample the mesoscale frontal features and also find large hail (given what probes 1 & 3 had found -- they were already out of commission with major windshield damage). We ran into baseball and softball sized hail, leading to us receiving the bronze metal for windshield damages on the day, meaning we had several cracks, but not enough to end our day.

Our hail damage -- a bronze metal on the day, but still something of concern no doubt -- all for good data!

The tornado continuing to rope out, from a distance

From there, we pushed eastward through hail, and finally found ourselves out in front of the storm. As the storm caught up, the tornado roped out and eventually disappeared, and didn't appear to produce again. However, it came close as we made our final transects on the day, and we even were able to sample some surface circulation despite no tornado forming.

The mesocyclone later in the storm -- we thought it might produce another tornado, but no such luck

So close -- but these were just good looking scud than funnel clouds

In the end, it was an incredibly successful day from both a scientific and chaser prospective, and certainly a day that I will never forget. The next few days appear prime for chasing right through the end of the project, so wish us luck!

Pretty mammatus clouds as sunset from our target storm, from the south