11 May 2014
So the weather had been quiet here for about a week until Sun 11th May. We positioned ourselves in Emporia, Kansas the day before. Then the chase started from about midday on Sunday. We headed north through Manhattan and stopped at Marysville to gather data and to see what the storms were doing. We then proceeded north towards Milford, Nebraska where we started to see a beautiful collar cloud – which was attached to the cloud base above the wall cloud. These collar clouds are associated with tornadic producing super cells.
From the reflectivity and velocity we could see a huge tornado but at the time could not visually see it…. I’ll get to that reason shortly.
We then started criss-crossing our way through the network of country and dirt roads to try and get a better viewing position and to stay ahead of the Tornado. Sometimes encountering the huge inflow of air being sucked up into the super cell up to and in excess of 80mph winds.
We then reached Milford and tried multiple times to reach highway 6 that ran parallel to interstate 80. But each time we were turned back by the huge forces of the rain wrapped tornado. We knew that the tornado was there, but could not see it due to the rain curtains. With a HP (High Precipitation) super cell like this one we encountered, the rain bands wrap around the tornado. At one stage as we turned around, we were in the outer circulation of the tornado, now that we know it was an 1.5 mile wide EF-3. A HP super cell is very dangerous for the reason you can’t see it until it’s too late.
We then dropped back to watch a lovely rotating super cell that was to the south west of the main tornado producing cell. As from the video I posted you can see the whole cloud structure rotating around itself.
The video is almost 10 minutes in length but it is worth watching the entire video. Go pro footage outside the car and hand held video from inside the car!
After this we continued east on interstate 80 driving parallel to the main cell towards Lincoln and then onto Omaha and then based ourselves in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Here we experienced the bruit force of mother nature at its best. I took a few photos of the city of Omaha, then as the storm moved through we experienced storm force winds in excess of 80mph. I had thought that we were encountering the tornado itself. The rain was sandblasting our car, the nearby trees leaning on angles never seen before. Just with one super cell, I had seen the most amount of lightning I have ever seen in my entire life!
Over the two days we traveled to 5 states; Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. Such a great road trip and one rain wrapped wedge tornado I’ll never forget.