Wilber, NE Storm

This was somewhat of an ad hoc chase day. University of Nebraska professor Ken Dewey took me into what is left of the town of Hallam to meet with clean-up operations. A cell to the west quickly became severe and the town was evacuated as no viable shelter remains after the massive F4 tornado on May 22. We drove to the Lancaster County Emergency Operations Center and assisted with storm monitoring for a good hour until the severe threat exited the county. After looking at some data I told the EM that more storms were likely after 4pm and keep the spotters ready. The professor and I picked up James and headed toward U.S. 136. We decided to turn west toward Wilber instead as a healthy cell was taking shape. We went just past Wilber and watched a fascinating wall cloud. The cloud was very low to the ground but couln't seem to really get going, possibly due to relatively cool inflow into the storm. The morning convection strengthened the boundary but may have left too much locally chilled air. Jeff Piotrowski and other chasers eventually converged on our location. Thinking the storm wouldn't produce we went west. The storms fired one after another and we could see another wall cloud west of U.S. 81 where we abruptly turned south, again thinking there would be too much cool air on the boundary to get tornadoes. We followed Jeff into Kansas and watched a rather strange updraft of a severe warned cell. The updraft resmebled an LP type that was very skinny but nevertheless clearly rotating. Realizing that Kansas was not happening my crew went back north and then west. We had fun with the outflow of severe warned cells in Republic and Jewell counties and then proceeded north on H14 toward Superior, NE. We parked right on the state line and photographed a very large and spectacular field of mammatus. We then turned east on U.S. 136 taking the occasional photo.