5/18/2014 - Northeast Wyoming Supercell

Sunday would be Trip 2's last chase day due to the extremely long ferry ride back home on Monday.  We sat in Lusk for a good portion of the afternoon waiting for storms to form off the higher terrain in Wyoming.  An initial storm formed south of Buffalo, which ended up being the storm pictured below. Initially, we were reluctant to go after this storm since it looked multicellular early on and the rather poor road network ahead of the forecast path.  In addition, a storm was forming near Torrington, which kept our eyes to the south.  And, even worse, models continued to hint at supercell development in our area. We were clearly torn. After much hand-ringing, we decided to go north for the storm near Wright since it had perked up and looked much better on satellite and radar. We had a visual quite early on approach, with storm exhibiting an interesting fat-ish, barber pole appearance at times, with a massive visual vault. It was very high-based, but exhibited dramatic rotation. We managed a few closer stops to fire of a few rounds of pictures before the storm disintegrated. I only wish I had made the decision to head north earlier.

A couple brief lapses.