Day One!

Don't read too much into that exclamation point... ;)

I made it eventually on the road by 7am, like I planned this morning and didn't end up meeting up with Jared, John and Gregg until 4:00pm in Aurora, NE. While we targeted the dryline setting up across eastern Nebraska, things didn't seem to phase correctly today and it seemed that we just didn't have that extra "umph" with surface-based buoyancy or mass convergence to get updrafts to withstand the deep-layer shear we had today. Plenty of towers went up today, but they just couldn't get their act together.

Ironically, the storms of the day were in Oklahoma (where John, Jared, and Gregg were traveling from) and in North and South Dakota (where, obviously, I was traveling from).

To make a long story, short, I only took two photos today with the camera and didn't even take the video camera out. It was that bad.

We're sitting in Omaha for the night and will likely make a decision in the morning to aim for the severe threat over central IA and southeastern MN during the afternoon.

Hopefully, we'll have some better luck.