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Started the day with an initial target of Broken Bow, NE. Once in Broken Bow, we then went after the tornado warned cell for Lincoln County, NE. We got on the tornado warned cell near Arnold in far western Custer County. The cell had a wall cloud with it, but it was fairly high based. We stayed in the Arnold area for a while, and then got word of the tornadic cell SW of Kearney. Me and my chase partner Darin Kaiser decided that it would continue to have a decent chance of staying tornadic for a while. So, we decided to make the 110 mile track in order to get out in front of it. Eventually, we made it to St. Paul, NE and then dropped south on Route 281. We were able to get into position about 6 miles south of St. Paul without getting cored, thankfully. Once the cell got to us, it more or less stopped producing tornadoes (although still tornado warned). Figures huh? We then went East of St. Paul, aprox. 12 miles or so to get a better view of the tornado warned cell. WE still did not notice anything impressive, so we decided to sit and wait to see what the storms to our SW would do. at 7:40 or so, we noticed a tower that very quickly went up to our WSW, so we decided to go after it. Aprox. 5 minutes later, a wall cloud with an inflow cloud quickly developed under the tower. Around 8 pm a funnel developed under the wall cloud roughly 5 miles or so North of Palmer, but it only lasted about a minute or so. Right after the funnel dissipated, the wall cloud quickly collapsed. After that storm, we just more or less just messed around with "junk" the rest of the evening. Not too bad of a day really, but I wish we were on that Kearney cell a lot sooner!! The water tower picture was shot the following day in Iowa.   

 

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Copyright  © 2006 Mark Sefried