May 27 2012 Chase Log

May 27 2012
James Gustina

Summary: The final chase of my Plains trip. Ended up south of York, getting a nice elevated cluster that came out of northern Kansas. A few gustnadoes and some small hail came along but not much else. Missed some of the tornado warned storms further north but the storm we got was perfectly satisfying.


On the 26th we had an easy jaunt up to Omaha from Topeka. We got to check out the cool warehouse district in downtown Omaha and for the first time got a sit down dinner before 10. I was eyeing the next day in south-central Nebraska. The morning of confirmed where to go. We made a tentative target of York and went on our way. There was a potent shortwave coupled with some extreme speed shear over Nebraska. Instability was modest with dewpoints climbing into the mid-60s. It looked like a typical severe weather day. The problem was the high MLLCLs which were sitting at around 1 km along with a pretty stout cap at 850 mb. The SPC had gone moderate for hail and wind with a small 5% tornado risk, but it didn't look like tornadoes would be very likely.











Despite the stout cap, it looked like it would break sometime around 20Z. We rolled out for York and then set  up shop in the Starbucks (why there was a Starbucks in the middle of nowhere I will never know). After a few hours we switched over to McDonald's (lunch and free wifi, awesome combo). It was right after this that we met up with Robert Forry in York. I can't thank him enough for letting us tag along, especially since he had data. It was awesome to finally meet.

After meeting up in York we began to drift south towards an area of agitated CU. We watched the towers for about 45 minutes trying to get going but nothing quite clicked. We finally decided to move back east to get the severe cluster coming out of Kansas.










We got directly in front of the cells as they moved over the state line.

We finally came to a south bound road and headed south towards the eastern side of the cluster. There were some brief gustnadoes along the gust front as well as what looked like a rain foot.

Shortly after the photos above were taking we went through a little dirt road town called Ohiowa, one of the funniest names I have ever heard on the road. Unfortunately the roads didn't turn back to pavement and the core was a mere mile away by the time we got out of town. About half a mile up the road we started getting half-dollar sized hail and some strong winds. The car we were in was not designed to handle dirt roads well, so we needed to find a route out. I again can't thank Rob enough. He got us a route out back to paved roads that would allow us to circumvent the storm.

After getting back onto a paved road we blasted east again. We continued east to about Wilber before stopping again. The storms at this point did not look at all impressive:

We finally decided to call it a day and headed to Lincoln for dinner. On our way out of Lincoln we were treated to a nice view of some distant towers as the sun set.

All in all, it wasn't a bad way to end the trip. That night we continued on to Des Moines so we could make the drive to Cincinnati in one day and got into Des Moines around midnight.

Chase Stats
Miles Driven: 433
Cost: $260
Tornadoes: 0
Hail: Half dollar