5/18/13: A Surprising Day

We started the chase day by shooting north to Winner, SD to sit and wait for storms to fire and move based on their location. Storms were forming south and west of Winner, they were nearly two hours south and west. Looking at the radar, it was going to be our only opportunity for the day. We headed toward the storms, which had started to form into a line of storms. Lines of storms are not typically the greatest thing to chase, but if you do end up chasing a line of storms, the southern most part of the line is usually your best bet. So we headed for the southern storm. After starting to catch up to the storm, it began to weaken more and more and became less and less exciting to chase after. I think we were all under the impression that the best part of the day to chase was past us, so we were beginning to just head toward the hotel. Luckily, as we were heading south toward Ogalalla, NE we noticed an LP supercell thunderstorm in the sky that wasn't showing up on radar.LP just stands for "low precipitation," a storm ideal for chasing. It was moving at a crawl and we were sitting in a great spot in the Sand Hills of Nebraska that let us view this storm. It had been given a tornado warning a little after we had stopped to take photos and just watch the storm unfold so we decided to stick around for a little longer in case anything came of the tornado warning. Unfortunately, after sitting and watching for about 45 minutes, a tornado never did form but we got to see some really great storm structure and witness an intense lightning show.