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May 5, 2003 Fremont NE

Well some days you really lose on the greatest of setups. Some days stuff just magically happens for you. I basically busted on one of the largest tornado outbreaks in the US yesterday. Then tonight for some reason I loaded a radar image of NE. What do I see, but a little storm with a hook is heading se from about 80 miles away. I flew out the door. View here from north of Fremont NE. Anvil is getting blown to the nne as the storm drops straight se.

There seemed to be a constant area of inflow to its south. Right above this base and inflow it wasn't billowing up high at all, but was doing ok further ne. Must have been some decent shear aloft. I guess the instability was pretty weak too.

Same spot.

I've never shot lightning in my life and have been looking forward to trying. Well I did once before but as I got out of the precip the entire lightning display quit and I got nothing. So these are the first. I have shot a good deal of night shots with this camera so I simply applied that.

For the longest time the lightning was quite infrequent. At times a 30 second exposure wasn't getting one flash. The moon is quite blown out. I'm not sure you can really do this without getting that, other than shooting 2 exposures.

It's quite possible I'll be hooked on lightning now.

Fun stuff.

It was quite infrequent, but I got a few.

I'm sitting due north of Fremont, looking sw at the base. It didn't take long before I realized I need to get se fast. During this period the lightning increased considerably.

Well sometimes missing your exit isn't such a bad thing. I wanted to take the bypass around Fremont but I missed. I saw this to my sw and was like, crap, I wish I didn't miss my exit. I pulled over and shot some more stills in town.

Notice the white haze to the right. That would be a hail shaft. My cam is mounted to the driver's side window. Before any precip falls, whack, a chunk of hail almost hits my cam. Hail fell for a bit and then I took off south, then east, just north of this as it dropps se out of view. I drove through some quarter sized stones on my way home.

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