Omaha Tornado Chaser: 4/5/10 First chase of 2010 season

Well i went out on my first chase of the new season this past monday. Unfortunately didn't see much, but it was nice to get out since the last time i had gone out was back in may of last year, before the malibu was wrecked. the day before i set up the laptop mount, with some great help from my wonderful wife, and got the car "ready". i was excited to try out some new stuff i had received over the the past several months. last year i had a garmin that i of course used for navigating. it was pretty helpful obviously, but using it had some restrictions, like map details and having to type in stuff while trying to drive, etc. so i bought microsoft streets and maps and put that on my computer. it does alot of the same things as the garmin, but it also has maps that are alot more detailed and easy to navigate around. the other nice thing that came with it was a gps puck. this is just a cord with a small gps receiver on the end of it that i can plug into my computer and then i can use gps on the streets and maps program. thats the other reason why i bought this software bc i can also use the gps function to then plot where i am at on my fancy radar program i have, grlevel3. this is nice bc then i know exactly where i am at in relation to the storm.
alright back to the chase! the setup today was a strong warmfront that was lifting north during the day into southeast nebraska and eastwards along the missouri/iowa border. south of the front temps were into the 80's and north of the front omaha basically stayed in the upper 50s all day. there was incredible shear along this front. at one point the 0-1 km helicity was 600 m/s2!! that's at least 4x the amount normally needed for rotating storms and tornadoes!! unfortunately there wasn't really anything to kick off storms that day so it was a "hope and pray" day for tstorms. hope that there would be something little to set off the storms or enough heating to get em to go up. i headed south along I-29 and as i reached just north of falls city, it became sunny and very warm instantly. i stopped at a place called oregon, mo, to wait for storms. the storm prediction center was monitoring the possiblilty of storms firing soon. i waited for about 45 mins watching the data on my computer. i decided that the front was getting a little to far north of me so i started to head north and east a little bit and ended up east/southeast of maryville, mo. for a while things looked promising as towering cumulus started to develop. but, unfortunately they couldn't sustain themselves and would fizzle out. finally around 7 i decided to call it a day, when my radar updated with some storms rapidly developing back to my southwest in northeast kansas. i was running out of daylight but thought i could race back to falls city, neb and meet them in that area right around sunset. i made it back in time, but on my way back they didn't really get much more severe than some hail. i stopped along the interstate at one point to try and get some pics of the storm but it was already too close. i am still getting familiar with all the settings on my new camera that i also got over the winter, so i spent most of the time fiddling with the camera rather than taking pics. it wasn't long though before the storm overtook me with heavy rain and some pea sized hail. it was here where i really used the gps feature now on my radar to drive back exactly into the core of the storm, but again it was only small hail. i continued to head home to omaha, arriving around 1030 pm. some elevated storms with small hail developed southwest of omaha and moved into town after midnight with some intense sheet lightning and heavy rain and small hail. i received 1/2 inch of rain at my house. so overall not a great chase but it was nice to get out for the first time in 10 months. the season is still real early, so i hope it gets better! here's a picture to the path i took that day, another nice thing about this new program i have!! i also included the risk probabilities and some of the hodographs that showed the intense shear in the sky.