Day Five...

What was initially planned as a relocation day turned into a nice surprise. We left Norman Wednesday morning, shooting for Hays to pick up my car, then to continue on to McCook, NE - where we were going to stay for the night. We expected a chase day for Thursday, so we wanted to find a spot somewhere near the NW-KS/SW-NE border for the best logistics.

We made it to Hays with no problems, and while, we continued monitoring the situation in Colorado through the afternoon. Upslope action looked to be fairly marginal and initially we thought of blowing it off for the McCook destination. While in Hays, however, we decided to shoot for storms that had begun developing off the mountains in eastern and northeastern CO. We made our way westward along I-70, eventually making it near Kit Carson, where we dropped south to observe a rather nice cell there. The storm showed a decent couplet on GrLevel3 in the velocity data, so we busted through the edge of the precip core from the north, to get to the southeast quadrant and made it in time to watch the lowered cloud base to our west move to our north and east. The wall cloud did get its act together somewhat and did exhibit rotation, but it didn't quite drop anything. There were very brief funnel "attempts," but nothing materialized. It seemed that the high LFC's today really hurt our chances at seeing a tornado. And it also didn't seem that the storm, itself, had a very pronounced RFD to help wrap up the low-level mesocyclone.

Either way, we watched the storm move off to our east-northeast into more stable air as it rained itself out.

We're sitting here in Colby, KS tonight and we're getting rather excited about tomorrow's potential. It's looking like it may turn into one of the better setups we've had this week and with a Day 1 outlook that includes a 15% hatched in it's tornado probabilities, it's got both Jared and myself rather anxious for what could be in store. It's looking like central Nebraska, perhaps, far north-central Kansas will be the place to be. Should be fun!

More later...