Sunday, August 3, 2008

Eastern Nebraska severe weather outbreak 6/11/08

Only 2 days after the tornado that touched down in omaha, there was another moderate risk over eastern nebraska. My friend Shawn and I went out chasing. The first severe tstorm warning came out at 430 west of Omaha by Wahoo, NE. Cells were also firing up in SE S Dakota that were already tornado warned. We had a tough time deciding which way to go. We started to head west and the cell that was warned weakened, so we headed north towards Blair. The southern end of the line was filling in with severe storms all the way from northwestern Iowa back down to west of Omaha, so we stopped in Blair to try and make another decision of where to go. We decided if storms were going so close to Omaha we would head back that way. I came up on top of hill just west of Blair and looked to the north and saw a beautiful lowering and beavertail leading into it. I got real excited and turned the car around to go north and try to get get a better view. Unfortunately there is a lot of hills in that part of nebraska so we ended up about 10 miles north of Blair before we could get into an area that was flat and had a good view of the storm. by this point we were probably only 5 miles from the storm and it had lost some of its structure. Shawn and I got out of the car to film and take some pictures. It really tried to reorganize again and definitely had some rotation at times but didnt drop a tornado. As it began to move away from us to the northeast we had another decision to make. Do we drop back to Blair to cross the river and get on I-29 in Iowa to go back north, or do we just head back towards omaha where there were also tornado warnings. I remember telling Shawn if we follow this storm it won't produce, if we don't follow it, it will drop a tornado. Unfortunately I was right as we headed back towards Omaha and this storm went on to produce the Little Sioux tornado that killed 4 boyscouts. We drove south on Hwy 31 and got cored by a severe cell that was said to be producing a tornado. Once that passed we arrived in Elkhorn to the sirens going off there and reports of a tornado 2 miles west of town. Neither time did we see anything. I ended up back at my house, where we stayed in the basement for 1.5 hours because of the constant tornado warnings for Omaha as the line slowly moved through. i included a link to the storm reports from that day. i believe there ended up being 7 confirmed touchdowns but all were over open country excpet for the Little Sioux boyscout tradgedy.

http://w1.spc.woc.noaa.gov/exper/archive/events/080611/index.html

link to little sioux, iowa tornado survey(you might have to scroll down a bit to see the info):
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=oax&storyid=14381&source=2


small lowering on southern edge of cell

2 areas of rotation trying to develop

about as close as it got to producing a tornado. rotation wasn't very rapid in the lowering here

lowering a little less ominous now

huge anvil with mamatus clouds on the underside

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