Sunday was to be the "big day" of the trip, but ended up being a difficult and very frustrating chase. A
moderate risk was in place of the nice juxtaposition of ingredients across the central Plains. We targeted the area along the warm front where shear was maximized and a nice tongue of theta-e/moderate CAPE wrapped into the low. We lunched in Concordia, KS and waited for convection in Herbron, NE. By mid-afternoon, a storm fired to our west at the triple point. We caught up with it south-southwest of Sutton. Visibility was about as bad as I've ever "seen". The storm seemed to be hugging the poleward side of the warm front, always struggling to pull to the actual surface front. This meant lots of haze and almost foggy conditions ahead of the meso and, with relative poor shear vector orientation, quick transition to big ol' ugly HP mess. Dirt roads were mush due to overnight rains, which limited our routing. In addition, low-to-mid-level stratus restricted structure views. Also, I was not about to put the COD group in harm's way by hugging the notch and playing with the bear. This caused us to miss the low-visibility tornadoes this day, but better to be safe than sorry. We trucked ahead of the fast moving storm, sitting north of Lincoln for what ended up being our best view of the HP beast. Overall, a big disappointment in terms of pictures et al., but a fun storm to watch evolve on radar.
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| Clear slot and outer edge of the tornadic circulation well south of York. Reminiscent of El Reno with dancing white ghosts on the outer edge of the circulation. |
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| Low-level features in supercell becomes a little more visible north of Lincoln. |
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