i had another pretty successful chase on this one, especially for what i was expecting. april 24th was to be the first of at least 3 possible severe weather episodes across the plains. unfortunately for the first day, the moisture wasn't quite there yet, and the wind field across the northern plains was focused well behind the slowly southward advancing cold front. when i woke up in the morning the front was already within 60 or so miles northwest of omaha. i figured it would be through omaha alot earlier, but it was very slow to drop south. this allowed the temps to rise all the way to 91 here in town. finally about 4pm the front slid through the metro area ending the severe chances here in town, so my friend casey and i left about 5pm for western iowa to get back ahead of the front. some towers were forming pretty fast and a few of them would get pretty good sized before they would collapse on themselves. there were already severe storms in north central iowa and the line was slowly filling in back down to southeast nebraska. around walnut, ia on I-80 we started to run into some of the cells. around atlantic, ia, very heavy rain and some pea to marble sized hail started falling. about then the first severe tstorm warning in that area was issued. another stronger cell was coming up behind the first cell through atlantic, so we found the next exit and turned around to go back west to let this cell cross us as well. again there was marble to maybe a little larger sized hail. the line had backbuilded down to red oak, ia. we decided to head east a bit to hwy 25 and then head south and let this back cell come over us. radar was showing up to quarter sized hail possible so we waited on hwy 25 about 7 or so miles north of greenfield, ia, for a while as a real nice looking hail shaft headed towards us. the storm motions were nice, less than 30 mph generally, so unfortunately this cell weakened before it crossed us with just heavy rain. it was getting late so we thought it was time to start heading back towards omaha. while waiting for the most recent cell north of greenfield, there was a cell that was rapidly strengthening west and south of greenfield. we dropped down to greenfield and then headed west on hwy 92. about 5 miles west of greenfield we intercepted the last severe cell. grlevel3 was now showing up to 2.5" hail possible about a mile or so south of our position! we pulled over to experience the full brunt of the storm. there was actually about 3-4 "waves" of hail at our spot. the first had easily marble sized hail that lasted for a couple of minutes. there was a brief break before pea to marble sized hail fell again for several minutes. the next wave we could actually see coming down the road towards us! it was so cool to see the hail curtain moving down the road about 30 mph right at us! this period of hail had marble to occasionally quarter sized hail that didn't last too long before it quit one more time. finally some pea sized hail ended it. it was nearing dark now and this storm was very electrified. we headed south out of fontenelle and pulled over and took some great lightning pics for abut 20 minutes before driving back to omaha.
day 2 outlook(notice that 30% hatched area over eastern nebraska)
towers starting to go up just outside of omaha
some various pics of the different storms we intercepted. some of them had pretty cool structure
only real time where we saw some good rotation, but the storms were too high based to produce
some scud forming and rising into the base of the storm
radar grabs showing the hail core of the storm possibly producing baseball hail. we were 1 mile north of the storm where it is colored blue and white!
the pictures below were taken by my friend casey!
