Saturday, May 25, 2013

Day #5 (Chase day): May 24, 2013
Starting Point: Amarillo, Texas
Ending Point: North Platte, Nebraska

Mileage Traveled: 703 (Trip Total: 2626) 

We started our day off in Amarillo, Texas. Our target area for the day was near the Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado border. This area was selected because a dry line was located just to the west of this area and moving to the east. High convective available potential energy (CAPE) values along with strong surface winds and directional shear made this area a good target. The city of Tribune, Kansas was right in our target area. The picture below was taken by John Frye of an anvil moving over our location in Colorado west of Tribune, Kansas.

 
The main area that we are targeting was from the Tribune, Kansas up to Sharon Springs, Kansas and over to Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. We kept drifting back and forth right along the Kansas and Colorado border in this area.  We began seeing the development of storms to the west of us. The storms that we watch develop eventually started to get severe thunderstorm warnings. We began to pursue these storms and also view other developing storms in the area. This day gave us many opportunities to witness good storm structure. Picture below by John Frye as we started heading north in Nebraska towards North Platte.

 
In the late evening we began to travel to North Platte, Nebraska, which was our area to stop for the night. On the drive, north storms were approaching from the east. A tornado warning was issued for a storm directly to our east. We needed to turn around and head south to get out of the path of the storm. There was a lot of lightning that was associated with storms in the area giving us a chance to see have a visual reference on the storm. We stopped to the south of the storm to watch a great lightning show. The rest of the ride to North Platte we continued to watch great display of lightning.

As we start out for Day 6 of our chase we are heading towards Alliance, Nebraska. We will post throughout the day if internet is available on the road otherwise we will have a recap tonight.

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