Day 36 Discussion WY

[D-J-V]

Afternoon All,

 

The final tour of the season is underway, all guests are accounted for and we are on the road north from Denver to Wyoming to chase the slight risk that now runs from Montana extending down through Wyoming into northern Colorado.

 

Soundings from earlier today look positive with a good chance of discrete supercells with large hail and strong straight line winds, a tornado or two although unlikely can not be ruled out. We are expecting some excellent northern plains structure and some great photo ops for the first day of the chase with lightning shots to end the day.

 

A quick note about the forest fires around Denver, on leaving the hotel last night to pick up the final guest the sun was blocked out and the air was full of smoke from the fires to the south, a new experience for myself and the rest of the group!

 

We are aiming for Cheyenne, WY for lunch at the moment and will fire off another update then .

 

 

 

 

[D-J-V]

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/day1probotlk_1630_torn.gif

 

5% Tornado risk now for MT Easter WY and NE CO. Things could get interesting later on!!

[Cookie]

Have a great day guys! 

[Tom Lynch]

Forrest fires , you can never be too careful when playing with fire, especially in Denver!! 

 

Tom

[D-J-V]

For those who are still up.......

 

Been a slow few hours running up and down i25 but it looks our patience might just pay off as we have just seen our first CG and cells are starting to fire in our target area!

 

Stream is up and running....

[davehsug]

Thought you'd got lost 5 minutes ago, wandering around a trailer park lol!

[D-J-V]

Thought you'd got lost 5 minutes ago, wandering around a trailer park lol!

 

I can confirm that was an actual marked road.....was a great shortcut to get a view of the storms sitting over the Rockies! 

[D-J-V]

Quick Update.....

 

After lunch in Wheatland we headed a few miles further north to wait for initiation as a severe t-storm watch box was issued for our area. Storms fired in Montana and back in Denver which were not forecast or modeled further south. We waited, and storms finally started to develop due to the orthographic lift provided by the Rockies.

 

We jumped back south and watched as a storm grew on the mountains and began to ping out lightning, the storm finally moved off the mountains and moved NE into the warm moist air and pulsed up and down in intensity. We chased it north and attempted some daytime lightning but the storm looked to be weakling so we headed south, as we left the storm ramped up again and we were suckered into a chase instead of dropping south to i80 and catching some lightning off the storms coming in from Colorado.

 

The road options were not great and very slow, as we tracked the storm west to east it ramped up and took on supercell characteristics, we found a north option which would have made a great intercept road. We went slowly north and watched as the cell which was confused between LP and classic features crossed infront. The storm went severe but we missed our intercept by around 5 minutes. The guests got to sample some pea size hail and some jaw dropping scenery. 

 

From there we dropped back south and then south east to try and pick up the storms moving into Nebraska, due to slow roads we barely gained on these storms so stopped in Scotts Bluff for dinner and then went due south to the i80 and then east to Sidney where we crashed for the night. A few images below!

 

https://forum.netweather.tv/gallery/image/18333-wy-scenary/

 

https://forum.netweather.tv/gallery/image/18332-wy-updraught/

 

https://forum.netweather.tv/gallery/image/18331-wy-hail/

[Tom Lynch]

Nice work all  - Love the scenery round there too.

 

Tom