Day 2

We left our hotel in Columbia, MO this morning around 9:30 am.  After a quick stop at a Wal-Mart  just west of there to grab a few supplies, we continued west on I-70 to Kansas City.  At this point, we opted to cut north on I-29 to get to our west route on I-80.

We felt like we had a chance at seeing some isolated storms develop somewhere just east of North Platte in the Broken Bow area.  Severe parameters looked pretty good, but it was just a matter of whether forcing would be strong enough to break the cap.  We were depending on lee-troughing which doesn't always come through (especially with such a stout cap).  The HRRR (high resolution rapid refresh) remained bullish most of the day with regards to storm development this far east.  We started seeing a few cumulus towers go up (both to our west and on visible satellite) late in the evening as we camped out just east of North Platte.  We found a great place to pull off the road on top of a hill which had a beautiful vantage point in all directions.

Unfortunately, the towers had a difficult time maintaining themselves and quickly died out.  Around the same time, we were keeping an eye on a few severe warned cells moving out of eastern Wyoming into western Nebraska.  Although they looked quite healthy, we were still a pretty good distance away and knew that catching them before sunset would be difficult.  We decided to wait a bit longer (maybe 10-15 minutes) just to give the cumulus overhead a shot to develop.  When they continued to die out, we decided to dart west with eyes glued to how the severe storms moving into western parts of the state would hold up.  We passed North Platte (where we had already booked hotel reservations for the night)  and decided to keep heading west towards the approaching storms since they really seemed to be maintaining themselves via radar.

We stayed on I-80 West and eventually saw the outer edge of clouds in the distance.

It was about this time that the northern cell of the two became tornado warned.

Due to rain in-between the two cells and a setting sun, we decided not to pursue the tornado warned cell and opted for the southern (severe warned) one.  We also figured this storm presented the better photo opportunities as there wouldn't be cloud debris on its southern side.  All things considered (a full days driving and the earlier cap bust in our original target area), we were pleased with the structure pics we shot..here's a few phone pics...will post the better ones tomorrow that Katie and Travis took with camera/go-pro.  For now, it's bedtime.  We've already logged about 1,500 miles....back at it again tomorrow!

-Hans