A rather disappointing chase despite being a high risk day, granted more for a widespread severe wind event, but there was a 30% hatched tornado risk, too. It's still interesting to note the hole of no tornado reports, and very few severe reports in general in the 30% contour (SPC reports).
Anyway, I bit on it, so me and chase partners Adam and Amanda headed towards Lincoln, stopping at the rest stop on I-80 between Lincoln and Omaha to sit and wait. We had no data and heard that storms had already fired and formed into a line, and nowhere near us. With a thick cirrus canopy by mid afternoon, I already had a feeling this day was going to bust in our area. Nonetheless we sat and waited. Funny thing, though: we ended up using the regional radar display at the rest stop to make our decision to head southeast to intercept a mass of storms cruising northeast out of NE Kansas that was tornado warned at the time.
As we crossed the Missouri River into SW Iowa from Nebraska City, we began getting lots of tornado warnings popping up just behind us. I had a few friends nowcasting for me, and they told me the storms had congealed into a nasty line behind us and was barreling northeastward. We stopped briefly in Shenandoah before storms arrived, putting a tornado warning over us. In fact, we fled town in a hurry as the sirens began blaring and my friend Ben, who was interning at a weather station in Des Moines, told me, "get the hell out of Shenandoah!" For the remainder of the chase, it was us who were being chased, and everytime we left a town, the sirens would start going off there, and the radio reports said that the town we had just driven through was about to get pounded. We ended up getting cut off briefly by the line as it screamed our way and had to jet over hilly gravel roads to get out of the front of "the mouth" of rain that ate us. Basically the line chased us home and we saw little more than nasty shelf clouds.
| The shelf that eventually cut us off. We headed south for a few miles to try to get better position on a tornado warned part of the line. |  |
| Mean little shelf chasing us down after we escaped from it. I call that look a "mouth" seeing as it seems to want to swallow you in water. |  |
| Another part of the line near Clarinda. |  |
| Taken in Clarinda. Sirens were blaring at the time. Didn't see anything anywhere near here. |  |
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