Chasecation June 5th - 10th 2011 Day 1

This was a real treat. Four days outside of our typical chasing grounds with the 5th day being back in Oklahoma. We left Sunday the 5th and came home on the 10th.

This was the basic outlook I put together the day before we left. Basically it was all based off of the GFS and NAM. So, some might consider this not so much an actual forecast as an interpretation of data.

What amazed me is how well the models performed overall (and my interpretation wasn't all that bad either). 
Monday was basically right on but needed to be extended into Montana. Tuesday mainly needed to be more into North Dakota. Wednesday... well... that turned out to be more upslope in Colorado and Wyoming. But Thursday was right on... or very nearly.

Day one:
After spending Sunday driving into Nebraska we then set out into South Dakota on Monday anticipating supercells across the northern and western portions of the state. There was a frontal boundary draped across the northern areas with easterly flow towards the black hills along and ahead of it throughout the state. Wind shear was not overly impressive but favorable for some rotating storms up near the front and towards the black hills.

We spent a large chunk of the afternoon sitting in Midland north of I 90 trying to decide where to go. This was one of those "sit and watch visible satellite" days. Towards evening it was begining to look like our best bet was to take I 90 to Rapid City where the most pronounced cumulus were due to the forcing along the black hills. That easterly wind was helping to ram the warm moist air up against the mountains helping to erode the cap in that area.

However, as time passed and we reached Rapid City big HP supercell-like storms erupted just south of the South Dakota boarder in Nebraska. They were basically over the unchaseable sand hills we had driven up through earlier in the day. I really didn't want to go after them due to the better shear being further west near Rapid City and what began to be storm initiation over the black hills.

The storms over the black hills really didn't get organized though for a good long while and one can't chase in the black hills very easily. And as we drove west the storms to our southeast continued to get bigger... but still lacked any real organization.

After supper in Rapid City it looked to me that we might have busted since the cells over to our west continued to not do much of anything. Still, there was one complex of tightly packed cells in a little line trying to pass over the mountains. I figured we'd at least want to photograph lightning out of that apparently disorganized mess if nothing else.

There is one thing that I had overlooked that James had informed us about earlier:
The sun takes much longer to set in the northern plains than it does in the southern during this time of year. That became pretty apparent after the first day.

By 7pm-ish we had our first cluster of small cells coming over the mountains to the south of Rapid City and we headed south to meet them. These basically had formed a beautiful gust front that, at first, didn't look impressive. Once we were south of town a little ways it quickly came fully into view and we were stunned by its beauty.

This is one of the few moments where I have actually felt poetic... but even I am so bad at poetry none came to me. And therefore you will be spared any.

Well... no... I actually won't spare you completely:

The heavens declare the glory of God, 

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1

In Hebrew, at least, it is poetic... and true... so very very true...

I still can't figure out which of the two panoramas above I like most and whether or not it would be worth going back and doing HDR. Oh well... I'll figure it out sooner or later.

Normally when I see the leading edge of the outflow push that far ahead of the precipitation the storms doom is nigh. Or something like that. However, this guy kept firing cells on its leading edge for the next couple of hours or more. In fact, for all I know this small complex of storms traveled at least another hundred miles before dissipating sometime after dark.

Another interesting phenomena were the nearly continuous downbursts occurring due to a lot of evaporation of the precipitation in the mid levels. This little "bow echo" was severe warned for high winds and we got a brief taste of it with little rain.

I just have to say that driving underneath an incredibly high based shelf cloud with phenomenal structure in the rolling green plains of South Dakota was probably one of the most incredible experiences I have ever had to date.


This guy is KUDX and he provided all of our radar data for this evening. The HDR attempt on him is kind of sloppy... but then again it was done just to figure out how this HDR stuff works.

We had some amazing light after the storm had passed on the South Dakota hills. Kind of funny that I thought this first image was going to be the best with the HDR. But I was terribly wrong. With the second I just didn't know what I was doing which is why I stopped work on it, then did the first, and then went back to it after getting comfortable with photoshop's method of HDR.

Some of my favorite images to date and all from South Dakota. Still blows my mind that I was actually there.