SAT 30 MAY
We left our hotel at Salina KS for a 4 hour drive to our target of McCook NE, stopping at Hays KS to nip into Walmart and grab some lunch. Storms were expected to fire mid-late afternoon in NE Colorado and SW Nebraska on the northern periphery of a surface low over west Kansas, along an effective dryline/warm front intersection. The first cells developed by late afternoon, one more or less overhead, and another SW of Imperial NE. We opted to go after the Imperial storm initially, as it looked more sustained and it became tornado warned. At this stage I think there had been a brief landspout, which we didn't see, but cell mode was getting a little messy as storms struggled in the high CAPE limited deep layer (ample low-level) shear environment, resulting in often outflow-dominant modes.
By early evening additional cells were forming along the W-E oriented boundary, so we trundled north and east to keep up with these. They tended to be rather pulsey, struggling with interactions with adjacent cells etc - however, the storm approaching Wellfleet NE was much better organised, though approaching from the west we were not in an ideal position to see the inflow region and missed a brief tornado, hidden behind a tennis-ball sized hail core. We followed this storm, and came across some very large hail on the ground just northwest of town, before drifting north to North Platte NE. Once storms crossed north of I-80 they became rather messy and less severe, so we left them and headed east to Kearney NE to find a hotel, and be a bit closer to the next day's action.
Turned out a rather photogenic tornado developed near Yuma CO from the cells well to the west (that we briefly intercepted near Imperial) - sadly we missed this, but were happy with our hail finds anyway!
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| Hail up to tennis ball sized (>6 cm diameter) at the intersection of US 83/23 northwest of Wellfleet NE around 19:50L |
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