1920nebtrip2

Nebraska Storm Chase June 19 and 20, 2011 - Page Two

We went through kind of a weird period but still made good decisions in general as we let the area of rotation that produced our first tornado go and worked toward the original area of rotation back near Highway 61. We did this for two reasons: One, we believed given the strength of the rotation on radar that a tornado was still possible to our northwest and two, because another storm had become tornado warned to our west which was LP and quite visible.

After running around a couple of roads that were not in the best of shape we ended up back near our "wall cloud" spot when a tornado became visible to our northwest. It looked very close to Highway 61 and was likely on the ground for a considerable amount of time before becoming exposed. We observed it for about two minutes starting at 7:03 P.M.

One of our reasons for returning west was the tornado warned storm we could see in that direction. After our tornado number two weakened, we moved back to our original "wall cloud" spot and took a few pictures of the LP storm which was to our distant west.

We didn't give the LP storm much attention and soon returned to the chase of our original target storm. We made one close pass to the area of business by heading north out of Trenton before heading toward McCook.

A few minutes after leaving McCook, northbound on Highway 83, we observed what we believed was a fairly stout tornado to our northwest. We only saw this feature briefly while driving and there were hills and trees in the way of our view. By the time we stopped about six miles north of McCook, we were only able to see a suspended area of dirt under an area of rotation. In all likelyhood this was indeed a tornado and at some point it was probably quite strong.

We wound up dropping south of the storm and let it pass as it became well after sunset and no longer safe to mess with the dangerous storm. Moving back through Cambridge, NE we found an area of light debris that was caused by very high winds or a small tornado that we didn't observe. We moved up behind the storm along the east side of Harry Strunk Lake where we made several stops for lightning photography...

and wow was there some lightning! In fact, with the combination of storms to our east, north and west it may have been one of the better lightning shows I've ever witnessed.