About 3 weeks ago, I made a fast trip to central Nebraska to chase a cold-core setup that could prove to produce some tornado magic. Unfortunately, I was about a half-hour to a hour too far behind to catch the couple tornadoes that formed on this chase day. Frustrating, especially when you thought you left early enough. This area featured a low-CAPE environment with 2,000J/KG of CAPE, decent low-level helicity at 200m2/s2, and 0-6km shear around 30kts. I quickly drove west along I-80 and a few mini-supercells formed in the destabilizing environment near the low-pressure center in central Nebraska around the city of York, NE. These storms did exhibit some rotation and "spin-ups", but were really lacking warm surface-based parcels, but nevertheless a couple of brief tornadoes formed thanks to decent low-level shear. I took a few photographs, but not many on this day as I would have hoped since the storms were really well..."grungy" looking. A few photos however can be found below:
upward vertical motion indeed...
(Canon 70-300mm telephoto-zoom lens)
NE/KS border to my immediate south...
(back-sheared anvil)
A short YouTube video I've uploaded of
some small hail along I-80 from my GoPro (above)
After a long drive and sunset approaching I headed back east on I-80 and ended this chase as quick as it started. The tornado reports from the day can be found here.
