Chasing Dew Style...

What an incredible chase day!!! No, no tornadoes unfortunately, but so much else that was so new to me. This first picture is one of my favorites from the chase. It's my first supercell, a striated meso with a rotating wall cloud and a rope funnel forming... AWESOMENESS! I love how you can see the striation here. Just amazing!!! I was able to see this particular cell in it's early stages, watched it gather its wall cloud and develop 3 funnels. It couldn't ever get it's act solidly together, as the system was about to merge together to form one HUGE low pressure system. I am sorry to report that I am not quite sure where we were. I know we were in South West South Dakota. That's all I know. Jay know's better where we were. Let me tell you, the shelf associated with this system sailed across the sky.

It was quite amazing and beautiful. The coolest part was hearing Threat-net bellow, "Approaching a twisting storm, please exercise caution."

On our way to wherever we were looking at the funnels, we passed the badlands. The badlands are sort of the SD response to the Grand Canyon. It was a spectacular sight that I really enjoyed. Steve M. had prompted me to ask Peggy about the badlands, so I had been anxious to have the shot at seeing them. I was right to be anxious... nothing like that in Georgia, let alone South Georgia. Even more spectacular was that on the way back past the badlands, while we were trying to get ahead of the storm, there was some beautiful shelf cloud structure over the badlands. We were in a hurry, so that picture is sort of blurry as it's on the fly.

When we got to what was thought to be a reasonable distance ahead of the storm, we quickly realized how wrong that was, when we were caught in some hellacious outflow winds. The force was incredibly strong, just about knocked me off of my feet. Had to have been 60 - 70 mile per hour winds, and it stirred up some major sand. What a rush to be blasted with such a strong "force" of nature! While we were there, we saw the group from the College of Dupage. We knew it was (passed) time to get back on the road. A long line of chasers (including, as I was excited to see Chris Collura, who I waved to) traveled east to get out ahead of the storm... realizing that this monster storm had now become drenched with moisture and would most likely not form anything else and the outflow winds were potent. We decided instead to go after the dryline... sort of... we were going to attempt to hit the spot where the outflow boundary and the dryline (with a newly breaking cap at this point) would intersect, thereby creating potential for outrageous action. Unfortunately, the dryline quickly convected and formed more of a squall line event with dangerous winds... looks like a derecho in the making. Now, it was just our goal to stay ahead of this raging beast and head for the hotel in Fremont, NE. We were on the backside of the dryline, so we were able to experience a backjet anvil, which was incredibly impressive. That's the first pic here... we also got a chance to see a HUGE CU tower and I mean huge. I wish we weren't in such a hurry. I would have loved to have gotten a better shot of that one. I'm happy enough with what I was able to get though from the back of Suburban. On the way back, we were stopped by local law enforcement for going a little faster than we should have been... good thing he wasn't around when we were trying to outrun that insane gust front...

Anyway, that's today (ehem, yesterday) in a nutshell. Looks like tomorrow is set up for a high risk a little earlier in the day in Wisconsin... so, I'd better get to bed... I am currently watching the news as they advise people to keep their weather radios on tomorrow... expected to match some storm from June 1998, which offered winds in excess of 100 mph. I won't be spending too much time on my hair tomorrow.

I'm out for tonight... pardon any typos. I am exhausted!!!

G'night,
~Dewdrop