THU 04 JUN
We started the day in Mitchell SD, with several potential targets - stay put in the hope for some evening thunderstorms to develop along a stalled W-E boundary to the north (but likely to upscale fairly quickly), head to NE Kansas where stronger low-level shear would favour a greater tornado risk albeit in a relatively skinny CAPE / weak deep layer wind shear environment, or drift west to the Black Hills and potentially catch some more discrete supercells drifting into W/SW South Dakota from Wymong. After much debating, we decided to choose the latter and drove 4 hours west along I-90 to Rapid City SD, briefly stopping at Firehenge along the way.
After lunching, we had a short walk around the Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, before nudging NW to Sturgis SD. By this stage the initial supercells in NE WY were upscaling and becoming rather poorly organised / only marginally-severe. After looking at surface observations / mesoanalysis we felt the environment was too capped and decided to haul back east on I-90 towards new convection along the stalled boundary in eastern SD. Naturally it took us several hours to reach this, with a nice low precip supercell near Chamberlain SD seemingly struggling to become sustained, but we eventually caught up with an outflow-dominant storm at Wessington Springs SD around sunset, which had a nice shelf cloud. We ended the night in exactly the same hotel in Mitchell SD, having driven for 9 hours (and filled up three times) for effectively one shelf cloud!
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