July 1, 2007 |  Photogenic High-Based Severe in SD and Distant Supercell at Sunset
All photos © Copyright 2007 Matt Ziebell
In hindsight this day was a marginal chase setup, but if I'm off of work I'm usually crazy enough to drive 4+ hours to see some photogenic storms.  There had been several elevated storms well north of Dickinson, ND throughout the morning into the afternoon with a few showers and plenty of ACCAS farther south by midday.  Despite healthy dewpoints in Dickinson, the cloud bases around town were rather high and smoothed out signaling mostly elevated forcing underway, so I shifted my target farther southeast towards a surface trough near the ND/SD border.

Two surface based storms fired west of Mobridge, SD with the northernmost looking very HP and exhibiting a stout inflow band.  Visually I didn't see any real potential with this cell especially with a larger storm just upstream, so I proceeded southwest to the promising tail-end storm.  Like a punch in the jimmies, it went linear just as I arrived.  This storm did drop plenty of pea size hail, but I never even took one photo as there was little structure.

More storms developed southward along the surface trough and I did manage to take photos of one as it displayed some interesting cloud base textures with healthy inflow; however the rather steep T/Td spreads this far south (near Eagle Butte, SD) resulted in very high cloud bases and strong cold pools.  Here's one photo of this semi-interesting storm.

  
Convection around Eagle Butte quickly became multicellular, so I punched their meager cores with the intent of catching some sunlit structures on the rear flank.

 
My biggest regret was not sticking to my original target back in ND where a TOR-warned supercell developed prior to sunset.  I reluctantly threw on the telephoto zoom lens and took this photo looking about 80 miles to my NW.  I was just in that area a couple of hours prior...argghhh!!!

  
The sting of not being able to chase the ND supercell quickly melted away as the sun dropped low in the sky while further illuminating this Cb.

 
This was some pretty structure backbuilding to my SE.  In preparation for another day of chasing, I spent the night in Eagle Butte, SD assuming I'd have internet access at the Super 8...but it was not to be.  The motel had no wi-fi, there was no local dial-up internet number available, no town library, and believe it or not no Weather Channel!  I thought I was having a bad dream and almost debated cancelling my room and driving the hour to Pierre, but I stayed the night and was lucky enough to find internet services the next morning down at the local phone service office.  The community center was the only other location in town with internet and they were closed for the entire week!  Recommendation: Don't stay in Eagle Butte until that Super 8 gets up to par.
All photos © Copyright 2007 Matt Ziebell
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