June 26th, 2008 - Chase summary

The first real chase of 2008 up here in the Northern Plains is now in the books...

Our initial target area west of Bismarck turned out to be a good one. We departed Grand Forks around 11:30am and arrived in Bismarck near 3:00pm - exactly the 3.5 hour drive we expected. We spent a half-hour, maybe 45-minutes to top off the gas tank and grabbed a bite to eat at a local Schlotsky's Deli, then continued west to Glen Ullin. We turned north on SR-49 and sat off here about 2 miles north of I-94. We found a great vantage point to view west on top of a hill and observed two separate cells slowly move eastward toward us. The storms had already initiated over far southwestern ND and seemed to be maturing when we arrived at this location.

We had one cell to our west-southwest with the other west-northwest of us - probably between 30 to 40 miles. Both storms were exhibiting subtle lowerings in them and had a lot of scud underneath them. Each cell cycled through a couple of attempts at wall clouds before finally organizing into two very nice looking walls. Another cell to our north-northeast had also begun to develop by this time and, on radar, was also indicating weak rotation in the SRM product on GRLevel3.

The radar imagery was quite impressive as we had three distinct areas of rotation on radar all within a 30 mile radius of us. Granted the storms were far enough west of the radar that the rotation wasn't all that close to the cloud-bases. And that was likely the reason we hadn't heard any tornado warnings out for them. Visually, these things were quite beautiful to look at.

It was a general consensus today that these storms very likely didn't produce because of the lack of low-level flow. When we stopped north of Glen Ullin, we did not have any surface winds. It wasn't completely calm, but it may as well as been. Additionally, they were out of the south and not the southeast; what I had been hoping for.

Either way, after sitting in this location for about an hour and a half, we decided to get back on I-94, to head back East to get back out ahead of the storms and to possibly get in better position to intercept the storm to our northeast. This storm took off and was looking pretty meaty on GRLevel3. We made it East to near Sterling, then went north on SR-14 about a mile to pull off into a field entrance. We sat here to observe things for a while. Additional storms started developing along the pre-frontal trough, pretty much overhead and began to outrun us to the east-northeast. We tried to catch back up with this stuff by continuing north on 14 to Wing to meet up with SR-36. On our East turn here and progressing, we pretty much decided to bag the rest of the evening to head back to the "Forks." Our storms had merged with on-going convection to the north and seemed to be entering that MCS-o-genesis phase. We followed SR-36 east to US-281 near Pingree, then took this north to SR-57, where we cut across to Devils Lake. Here, we met up with US-2 to continue eastward to Grand Forks.

Lawson and Ahsenmacher played Super Mario Bros. on Nintendo-DS while Shaw and I chatted away and laughed how serious they were getting into their game. ;)

We arrived back in town around 11:55pm and after dropping Ahsenmacher, Lawson, and Shaw off at their cars at the office, I made my way back home.

Even with all the driving, I think it was well worth chasing that far west yesterday afternoon. It isn't often we can get a group of us together for chasing, so we took advantage of it. On top of that, it turned out to be a quite successful day for us. I feel we pretty much saw the best we could have today, without driving any further south. We had two very nice storms with nice wall clouds and did see hail in the form of "hail-shafts." Luckily, we were able to avoid being any part of one.

The GPS setup got a pretty good test run, as well today. It seems the Position Tracking turned out fairly well. It seems there are a couple of fixes to make but I've done these already, so hopefully in future chases, it will work better for everyone. The GRLevel3 application seems to have been a wise investment, as well. It turned invaluable when we were on the road and when observing storms near Glen Ullin.

I have a feeling I'm going to get spoiled with this data and GPS setup...

I'll have photos up at some point this weekend...

Total Mileage: 642.9 miles
Time elapsed: 11 hours 28 minutes
Photo Gallery: http://photos.mhartman-wx.com/