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July 26, 2014 Humphrey Nebraska Supercell

I guess there's not really a ton to type on this one.  I was going to head to the sandhills of Nebraska for some night sky stuff.  Figured may as well chase this setup on the way out.  Intercepted the storms early west of Norfolk. There were 3 closely spaced supercells, until I reached them.  Then they all began to line out.  Or so I thought.  I opted to just head to the middle one as that happened.  Then the west one got all supercell looking on radar again.  Dropped back south and then west and intercepted that one.  It stayed a supercell from around Tilden to Columbus, where it died out.  Cold and just messy at first. 

Nearing Humphrey it started to get a lot more structure.  Radar was also saying >4 inch hail at times.  Hmmm.  I'm all for hail but I still had to drive back out west after this.  Here I am trying to find a place without too tall corn and with the power poles on the right side of the road.  I kept going north till hitting the leading edge of the core.  I found a view there finally, but of course the storm was too much on me then.  It was always moving right along too.  So I took some fast corn shots and flipped around. 

Somewhere north of Columbus.  Here it looked its best.  It had a really long and beefy east-west band of clouds to the east of its base.  This looking due north.

I should have taken more frames for this pano.  3 at 14mm didn't stitch so well.  The east west portion to the north wound up too bulgy. 

Same time looking due west.  Heck yeah I'll take this.  It teased at producing a tornado a couple times.  Just zero inflow.  Actually the winds had even shifted to the north ahead of the storm a ways.  But it was moving 30mph to the south southeast.  I was starting to think I was going to end up almost back home before I was done chasing, which would normally be great.  Not so great when I have a 5 hour drive from home to make yet lol. 

Given the strong radar reflectivity this storm had been having and how it looked now, I really really wanted to sample the core here.  I'm all for losing my windows but only if it is big big hail.  No point in just cracking everything over golf balls.  I mean if one has to pay to replace them, it needs to be worth it hail.  But this day I didn't want to lose them before having to drive to northern Nebraska.  I kept going back and forth in my head right here.  Almost to the point of being too late.  This is 14mm full frame. 

At the last second I opted to just save hail destruction for another day, when I didn't have some place I needed to be. 

A few hours later I was at Merrit Reservoir.  See the next account for all that. 

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