6/1/2010 - Southeast Nebraska Gusters

On Tuesday, we targeted the area of south-central to southeast Nebraska – a region featuring a moderate risk. The short story is that things didn’t evolve completely has prog’d thanks to the early afternoon cold-frontal generation of convection northwest of the Omaha area. These storms generated a massive cold pool which, in turn, generated a progressive derecho-producing mesoscale convective system that slipped east-southeast and ended the next morning in the Ohio Valley. This system had stout pressure falls ahead of it, which caused the winds in the target region to veer a bit, reducing convergence and shear (and isolated tornadic supercell potential). Eventually, we chased the west edge of this MCS as it unzipped the cap southwest of the Lincoln area. We sat for quite a while in outflow near the Crete area, experiencing occasional strong gusts and wildly turbulent cloud motion. Once again, the western storms began to surge and so we headed south and eventually southwest toward the Fairbury area. We experienced 70-80 mph (estimated) winds in the Jansen area as a jetlet of outflow surged out ahead of the core about 10 miles to our north. These severe winds created a number of power flashes, downed a power line starting a fire, and made missiles out of last year’s corn stalks. For about a minute, it was an unworldly scene in rural southeast Nebraska. We ended the night in Salina, KS.

Shelf cloud west of Jansen.

The intense winds we experienced near Jansen -- gusting here to about 70-80 mph.

Gif animation of outflow near Crete.

Cool ol' school train depot in a field near Crete.

Video of the intense winds.