Day 8: The Fateful Day

Let's not beat around the bush, shall we?  We all know why you're here.  It's certainly why we are here right now- much like the remote photographer yearns for their chance to witness the elusive snow leapord, so too did we sneak our way into position behind the tornado in waits for it to form.  Well, I'm not going to make you wait.

There's a lot that went into making this sighting happen, a lot of stressed decisions and down to the minute driving, but I guess it'd just be easy to start at the beginning.  Our day started where most good days do: laundry zone.  Well, I guess it started in the hotel when we decided that the storms we wanted to follow were literally happening in the neighboring county and tha twe had the whole morning to try to combat the ran-out-of-shirts-two-days-ago problem (that might have just been me).  Not only did we spend our time at the laundry zone, however, but some of us had time to run over to the Wal-Mart parking lot next door and do a little geo-cacheing, which seems to be what all the cool kids are doing these days.  We like to stay modern here at SWIFT.

As the morning went on, models of the oncoming storms continued to come out, and with every new one a whole new wave of doubt and paranoia set in.  Do we head south towards the storms forming on the dry line, do we stay up at the convective boundary, which of these predicted cells will become supercellular- all these and more were brought up maybe 40 times today, and to be fair they were honestly good questions.  But when the time came to start moving into action towards the storms, it's almost as if everything was thrown to the wind and we just sent it.

At first we headed towards a storm West of where we had stayed- this proved to be a bit of a dead end early on, however, as not much happened with the storm.  From there, though, we chased it back past town and ultimately decided to abandon it on its trajectory northwards and instead head to the south to intersect a couple storms, one of which that already had a reported tornado in it.  The timing could not have been better.  As soon as we approached the main supercell in the region, a thin black funnel touched down to the ground, surrounded by a mass of clouds and debris.  It was quite difficult to see against the darker backdrop, but the signature was unmistakeably a tornado.  Well, excited to have seen just that, we drove to a large field with absolutely nothing in the horizon that could block our view, and almost as soon as we had unloaded the van there another thin funnel reached down to the ground and put on a show for us.  A third tornado would later extend 2/3 of the way to the surface, effectively putting our count for the day at 3.

We continued to chase a fair bit after our tornadoes had died down, but aside from some interesting lightning, not much else occured.  Still, the day was a phenomenal success, and to top it off in true SWIFT tradition, Professor Barrett and LCDR Burich treated the group to a steak dinner at the Nebraskaland restaurant.  Tired, but satisfied, the group rolled south to our hotel somewhat late at night, and we'll be up early again tomorrow to continue the chase once again.  What can I say, tornadoes are a lifestyle.