The storm did look pretty neat and the set up was something I had never experienced before. From a Meteorological perspective at least it was quite fascinating.
In the day leading up to this event it was quite clear that I really didn't want to chase anything in Nebraska or Kansas along the front. If I remember right the concerns were:
1: Lack of directional shear
2: Lack of upper level support since the main trough was still over the rockies.
Well, this left pretty much nothing to play across the plains. So, we decided to do what a few other chasers had been discussing and what SPC outlined in their outlook... upslope in northeast Colorado/southeast Wyoming BEHIND the cold front.
Across most of the plains the winds behind the cold front were very much out of the north. But the cold front bent back towards to the northwest across Colorado with easterly flow behind it. Dewpoints looked to be in the low 50's or upper 40's at best with temps in the low 80's.
Since the winds were easterly they were running this air right up along the front range and Palmer Divide. And these geographical features would be our means to force air to rise.
The day of the event actually yielded mid to upper 40 dewpoint air only. But we did manage to squeak out the 1000 j/kg. With the exceptional wind shear I was pretty excited.
We arrived in Ft. Collins around 3-4pm I believe with the first set of thunderstorms firing just west of Denver. It was pretty cool to be able to see the mountains with thunderstorms blowing up along them. We eventually noticed on radar the storm of the day just east of Denver (probably close to 4pm) and we began positioning for it.
We had a lot of fun with dirt roads since the one road option we had south of Ft. Morgan to position ourselves on basically turned into a dirt road after several miles and then it was nothing but dirt after that.
The storm itself we didn't really see until we were well south of Ft. Morgan. We saw a lot of anvil blow off that reminded me of the cirrus and alto-stratus we typically see in the winter time. (Very light and feathery compared with most anvil blow off, yet not very high in altitude). The anvil was considerably darker and thicker of to the west with a rounded flat base to it at the back. It took me a minute or two to realize that the flat base of the anvil was in-fact the rain free base of our supercell we were seeing on radar.
It was kind of a combination of the storm being high-based and the anvil being relatively low.
The storm itself really didn't change much with time. It seemed to maintain a very consistent low precipitation supercell profile with most of the rain being virga and blowing well down shear of the updrafts. It did manage some brief areas of rotation that were fun to watch, but the RFD never cut into the meso (another classic symptom of the LP).
The storm finally dissipated around sunset somewhere east of where we started. More fired in the evening back to the west, but we really weren't interested in chasing any more due to the exhaustion of the days drive. After supper in Ft. Morgan we did decide to try for some lighting near town, but it never amounted to much for me.
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