Frontier County, Nebraska - June 10, 2004

  My initial forecast target area about 36 hours out was a McCook - North Platte - Lexington - Beaver City polygon. The morning of the chase I targeted the small town of Eustis in Frontier County, Nebraska. Chase comapnions this day included UNL professor Ken Dewey and a Lancaster County storm spotter named Roger. We left Lincoln heading west on I-80 and stopped for a meal at the Cozad BK for lunch. After making contacts with other chasers we decided to head towards McCook and possibly meet with Jeff Piotrowski. We stopped near Maywood and found out he was already barrelling west toward the cell in northeast Colorado. We decided to stay put in our target area and met up with a West Virginia chaser named Dan (wvlightning) who had the new XM Mobil Weather Threat in his truck. Since we were targeting the same area we decided to hang out, chat, and wait. I kept saying, "It's early (for convective initiation)" until about 5:30 when storms finally started to pop in my area. We were in an excellent location and had to move little over the next two plus hours. The first cell fizzled fast but the second storm erupted and quickly became severe, followed by a tornado warning. We watched the cell gain character as we gradually shifted position. At one moment there was a small wall cloud to the north and a rainbow to the southeast and we all took more photos of the rainbow. Heading east on H23 we again captured a truely amazing rainbow, possibly the best I've ever seen. We stopped in an area near Curtis to watch the storm cycle. The storm's rotaion was amazing to watch. There was the typical cyclonic lowering as well as the more unusual anti-cyclonic lowering. A condensation funnel did quickly descend from the base but only reached about half way to the ground. There was very mild chaser convergence at that location. More signicant chaser converge occured just south of Gothenburg when the storm had pretty much cycled through. By this time, it was getting dark and with storms to our north and east we decided to stop at the same BK in Cozad for a late meal. We then departed east on I-80 and punched the storm. It was dry on the other side and we were able to see some really neat shelf structure lit by the amazing lightning display. We got ahead of the system enough to get gas without getting soaked. Severe warnings were out for all the counties just tow our west. We continued moving east and noticed another spectacular cell about 30 miles south of the freeway. I was glad to hear live broadcast coverage of the tornado warnings from the cell. An applause to the Hastings NWS office. The cell reamined south of the freeway and we made it back to Lincoln without a drop.

Click images for larger version

Photo of the Day: Cyclonic and anti-cyclonic funnel clouds along
with RFD north of Curtis, NE. (click image to enlarge)

Left: The chase starts at the BK in Cozad, NE. Right: Ken and Roger check out Dan's XM Mobil Weather Threat Net.


Left: Vanity plate from the truck in upper right. A long drive for a storm! Right: The first tower goes up (and later falls apart).


Left: Lone turkey tower near Wellfleet, NE. Center: Near Wellfleet looking west at neat light display. Right: A cell begins to get healthy.


Left: Same cell beginning to spin. Right: Same cell is beginning to get cranky.


Left: The cell contiunues to organize. Right: Heavy rain and hail begin to fall.


The Chase Continues: View More Photos from this Storm

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