5/22/2010 Nebraska/South Dakota

We left O'Fallon at 7 am on Saturday heading for the Kearney Nebraska area. We had one model showing some potential in this area, although other models were showing a major breakout in northern South Dakota. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to get into this more favorable northern target, this was a heart breaker, many chasers encountered multiple tornadoes in this northern area.

We arrived in the Kearney area around 3pm, the skies were clear, but we had strong southerly winds pumping warmth and moisture to the north. The trip on interstate 80 was a new adventure for me, I have never drove in that high of sustained winds. We stopped for a quick bite to eat then decided to head further North West towards the Thedford area. We headed north on 183 then east on 2. This turned out to be my favorite part of the trip as we entered the Sand Hills region, what a beautiful landscape.

The weather was trying to help, but each time we would see a decent updraft start, the cap would just destroy it. We had noticed another chaser catching us from behind all day via Spotter Network. This was David Tonner out of Springfield, MO. We stopped in Dunning to take a short break, observe the clouds and see if we could stop David and chat with him about the weather. After a 30 minute break David was now in front of us, we headed out to Thedford. Just past US 83 we found David and his chasing crew, we talked for a few minutes then we decided the day was a wash and started heading towards Grand Island for the night.

Within 10 minutes of heading back east we looked to the northwest, to our surprise it appeared that some updrafts were surviving the cap's fight. After a quick u-turn we headed north on 83, it was looking more promising. We pulled over about half way to Valentine and just watched and took pictures. The pictures can be seen in our Photo Gallery. Shortly after the pictures were taken we had a well defined wall cloud or funnel cloud in view. This was quickly wrapped in rain from the rear flank down draft.

Now we realized we had to get north and east, this turned out to be a difficult task in this remote area. We headed north through Valentine into South Dakota. We found a paved road that would take us east and would send us between the two supercells we were tracking. The timing seemed just right to get us between the storms then head north east to get in front and catch the wall cloud again. Then 8 miles down the road it turned to an unpaved road, we continued on encountering some nickel size hail. We stopped and waited for the hail to pass then continued, the road turned north and was in worse condition. We decided we had pushed our luck enough and turned around.

On our way back to Grand Island we watched a tornadic supercell to our north with the help of a spectacular lightening show.

In summary

This was our second official chase, we have witnessed rotating wall clouds on both chases and possibly funnel clouds, although the funnel clouds were not confirmed.

We drove 1500 miles round trip on this chase, from 7 am Saturday until 1 am Sunday morning was nearly 1000 miles.

All of our equipment operated flawlessly this time out. We had good internet 90% of the time a fair connection 8% and slower than dialup 2%. We are using Verizon as our provider and a Wilson amp to insure our connection. We streamed video on several occasions and it seems to be working fine.

Upon arriving home we decided to invest into our comfort while chasing. This has consisted of a USB hub and a 90 degree USB plug. This will allow us to have one USB cable off the laptop running to all the equipment hooked to the hub under the seat. We experienced some frustration with Microsoft's Trips and Streets program, it has been replaced with Garmin Mobile PC. This software's interface closely resembles Garmin's portable GPS line, we will surely be more comfortable with this software. I also purchased a new GPS sensor which will be mounted outside the vehicle, this will provide better data as well as being more sensitive to pick signals up during heavy weather.