June 7, 2006 Storm Chase - Central NE Supercell with F1 Tornado and Haboob

June 7, 2006 Storm Chase | Central NE Supercell with F1 Tornado and Haboob
Chase Partners: Randy Baker, Phil Kurimski, Mark Rader, and Kirk Swain
Unless otherwise noted, all photos © Copyright 2006 Matt Ziebell

Today's chase target originally looked to be in northwest NE along a zonal stationary boundary. Surface winds south of this front were SSE with WNW winds of ~25kts at 500mb. Similar to June 5, morning convection (this time in SD) disrupted the boundary and the 12z models began losing credibility fast. We shot north into WY from Fort Collins and then pressed east on HWY 20 as our winds began gusting from the NNE confirming the boundary's passage. By mid afternoon, we noticed agitated Cu well off to our east and radar began showing some interesting cells near Valentine. We had a long drive ahead of us, but we managed to get south of Valentine on HWY 83 to intercept a linearizing cell north of Thedford. We had plenty of ¾ - 1" hail with outflow gusts easily pushing SVR criteria while driving south of Thedford. Eventually we got ahead of this multicellular line to photograph its leading edge shown here.

At the time, radar didn't paint anything interesting with this cell and we were getting disappointed by how far south the outflow had already been advancing. The cell's motion was SEerly, so we decided to head east towards Arnold to check out the cyclonic shear end of the shelf cloud. Sure enough, our surface winds gradually turned more SSEerly and we found ourselves looking north at this interesting lowered updraft base/developing mesocyclone.

As we neared the west side of Arnold, Randy noticed a spin up to our north. The debris was slowly rotating from the surface eventually on up to cloud base and therefore became a legit tornado. Kirk's roofcam caught the entire development and some rotating debris later on.

This tornado was brief and the NCDC storm report indicates that it overturned two irrigation systems while having damaged some crops. It was officially rated an F1 and didn't last for than a few minutes. After dissipation, it was quickly followed by the outflow filling with dirt via some open fields nearby. Not more than a few minutes later, we were overtaken by the outflow while in Arnold as the meso became hidden nearby from our view.

Photo courtesy Phil Kurimski. Video and stills of this tornado by Kirk can be seen by clicking here.

After getting blasted by the leading edge of the incipient haboob in Arnold, we raced south and were mesmerized by the wall of dust now to our north that we had just escaped. At the time we weren't sure if the meso was undercut by this massive outflow, so after these shots we found an east road to take us back in the SE quadrant of this SSE moving storm. Kirk has an awesome panoramic shot of the haboob here. On a side note, I never saw a haboob this good during my time in Iraq despite ones such as this being not too uncommon to that portion of the Middle East.

As we continued eastbound, the rotating updraft came back into view. We hit the core of the inflow at this location with SE winds gusting to probably 30kts at times causing bands of dust to ascend from nearby fields.

The outflow now appeared like a door wedge thanks to stronger inflow winds smoothing it significantly.

A view of the meso and inflow streamers to the NNE.

CG activity was really beginning to increase around us at this point, so we packed up and shot south to stay safe.

The meso structure slowly became more outflow-ish in appearance, but the CG strikes were only becoming more fervent. After this, we continued south to Lexington and en route Phil's wx radio began discharging several static currents - each accompanied by an audible "snap" sound. Phil somehow managed to get the antenna feed off to prevent anything worse from happening. Since the radio was running on batteries, we later speculated there may have been a grounding issue of sorts involved. The same thing happened a few days later while near another electrified cell!

We pulled over behind a motel in Lexington and set up our cameras for what turned out to be the best CG lightning display I've seen in quite some time. The bottom row of shots shows what was very likely a new meso that developed just before 2100 CDT. The display was so vivid that a passer by walked out into the field by us and began snagging some shots with his cell phone! Of interest, we observed an inordinate number of U-shaped bolts during this time.

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