Yesterday was an active storm chase day. We started the day in North Platte, NE, and decided to head north. Our first stop was at a small park in Thedford, NE, but it was down in a valley.
We continued north through the Nebraska Sand Hills to Valentine, NE. We stopped at a Caseys, and then jogged across the South Dakota border, just because we could (it was only ten miles away).
From there, we doubled back and hung out at a neat park north of Valentine for quite some time. There was a little campground and a bridge over a creek.
Soon, a few storms began to fire to our north, south and west. In Valentine, we had the option going any of these routes. Looking west, there were no north-south roads, so we ruled that one out. Going north was the Badlands, and going south took us back through the Sand Hills, but towards the storms that were bunching up less quickly.
At Thedford, we turned west towards Seneca, where we got a good view of one of the storms. It was high based, but was starting to show some structure.
From there, we continued west to Mullen, and then headed north along NE 97. Our original storm fell apart, but a few more storms fired along that boundary.
Interestingly enough, rising cloud tags led to a rotating wall cloud off in the distance. There was a dangly appendage, but we could not confirm it as a funnel cloud or tornado, as we were too far away to see whether it was rotating. We edged a little north, but the contrast was low and it looked like the storm was becoming less organized.
We dropped back south and watched the next storm, which started to organize, but then ran out of daylight and fell apart. We ran video and tried getting lightning photos with varying degrees of success. I didn’t have a lot of luck, but got this one.
After that, we drove south and spent the night back in the same hotel in North Platte.
This was our route:
Unfortunately, the APRS did not work yesterday, and I had to reset it this morning, so no tracks yesterday.
Thank you for reading my post.
High Plains Chasing 