Marginal to sub-marginal is better than down days!

Our fearless leader, leading us into battle :-)

We had a few chase days over the past several, both of which involved marginal to sub-marginal conditions. In other words, we had relatively low CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy), and barely enough shear (changes in wind speed/direction) to support supercells, but we chased anyways! The reason we are doing this is because these storms still provide valuable data sets, even if they do not rotate or produce tornadoes. Unfortunately I only have half of my pictures because my camera is in the probe and has the other set of pictures still on it. But that doesn't matter (because I'll probably just put them up later anyways!).

On the 29th, we traveled northward through Central Nebraska to chase a storm that had okay features to it. Unfortunately, it was in very dry air, and it quickly deteriorated as we approached it from the Southeast. Despite a bit of disappointment with the storm itself, some of the other storms around it provided some beautiful cloud structure, and it provided quite the lightning show (although no pictures were caught of that):

Big Anvil to our South -- it was very nice looking

It had some cool features throughout

The sunset lit it up to an incredible color

After a down day, we chased again on the 31st, travelling into Western Iowa to chase another storm that looked quite good. We found a few pea-sized hail stones, and not much beyond that. Once again, it was a nice looking storm, but not too much came out of it. There was some intrigue in that we wanted to see what would happen if we had a lot of low-level shear and little higher up, while still having okay shear. In the end, we had no rotation, likely due to really high cloud bases once again. Regardless, the chase was better than just hanging around.

North flank of the anvil and updraft with the mesonet rack

Southern flank of the anvil

Cloud bases from the North -- not bad looking, but at a really high elevation

The sun did all it could to break through the clouds

On the 1st of June, we headed back into South-central Nebraska to chase more possible storms. These storms had a lot of lightning (videos and/or still-shots will be posted later), and some hail, and even had some reported funnel clouds and gust-nadoes (all weak, but rotation none the less!). Just to our east, there were also tornado reports. Although we didn't see anything ourselves, it was encouraging to see that we are slowly getting closer to studying an actual tornado.

Our hopes are also getting high as the weather finally appears to be modifying into a more favorable pattern this upcoming weekend into next week. Although there is always concerns about the models, it looks like we will finally get some moisture and shear into the VORTEX2 domain, finally giving us an opportunity to perhaps chase and study what we've been after all this time. Everyone is being careful about getting too upbeat or 'cursing' the group, but it is certainly tough to contain the excitement. In other news, I was shifted into a different probe this week, probe 7. This change was made to ensure that everything runs smoothly for the remainder of the project, but it also includes a change in storm position. I'll still be involved in what is called 'punching the core' -- in other words driving through the heaviest precipitation and hail, but now we'll be doing it just in front of the circulation, adding a whole new level to the chase challenge. I'm sad to be leaving probe 3 (Chris and Kiel), but I'll have some new responsibilities now which makes it a bit more exciting in some ways too. Wish us luck!