Epic is overused when it comes to discussing tornado chase days, but I’d go as far to say that EPIC may not do this day justice.  After what was a pretty intense, perhaps not as epic day in South Dakota the day before, we found ourselves waking up at a frequented bunk-down place at the Super 8 in York, Nebraska.  Grand Island was our target city, about an hour west of where we were.

But we decided to take a shot on some early storms across the border to our south just after lunchtime.  We intercepted a gorgeous supercell just outside of Oketo, Kansas.  We stayed with this storm for a little bit, observing intense rotation and some hail, but the storm quickly fell apart as it moved eastward, so with plenty of time to spare, we turned our attention back to our main target up along I-80 near Grand Island.

With a little over two-hour drive back up toward the Grand Island area, the main show storms were already initiating before our arrival.  Our target storm went up north of Kearney, and we hauled westbound to get to get in position ahead of it.

We continued west, eventually hopping north off I-80 toward Wood River to set up along US-30 and avoid sagging too far south on the southwest jog that was I-80 west of Grand Island.  As we got a view of the base, we could immediately see rotation, a wall cloud, and eventually our first tornado north of Gibbon.

This tornado would lift fairly quickly as we made our approach, but still on a line to get ahead of this storm, there was plenty more action to come.  We backtracked on US-30 toward Shelton, and took Shelton Road north out of town to get ourselves in line with the business end of the storm.

We turned west on a dirt road and after cresting a series of small hills, each time we got a view, a funnel would dip further and further down until tornado #2 was confirmed by the group.

Another quickie, but much prettier at a closer range.  As we neared it, of course the tornado would lift, leaving behind a monster wall cloud and associated rotation.  We got a bit further east, but the storm was moving slow so we were able to stop for a bit to watch this wall cloud disorganize and reorganize north of Wood River.

We sat for what seemed like forever, watching this rotation go up and down.  As we were about to leave, a funnel poked its way out of the clouds, giving us pause while it quickly spun itself out nearly overhead.

With the funnel out of sight, we pushed east ahead of the storm on what I believe was Guenther Road southwest of Grand Island.  The wall cloud, which had fizzled a bit after the funnel quickly got itself back together near Alda.

At this point, there was growing concern of this storm as it approached the heavily populated city of Grand Island.  We eventually got to US-281 on the south side of the city and turned north to multiple areas of circulation, including funnels, descending on Grand Island.

This tornado would lift as it moved further into the city, but several other areas of interest were keeping us well occupied as we turned east on Schimmer Drive.  We thought this would be a quicker, less traffic’d/lighted route east.  We knew we only had a few miles before we were gonna be forced north back to US-34 ahead of the river, but this allowed us a decent shot east in the meantime.  As we got to and eventually passed Locust Street, two other brief tornadoes touched down, one to our immediate north taking down a couple trees in a yard and another shortly thereafter as we neared the north turn.

Neither of those two touchdowns lasted particularly long, a few seconds at best, and we saw at least one more while making the transition to the north.  Eventually we did safely get north to US-34, and then got ourselves east with the intention to make a little headway to get us out of the area where these circulations were forming.

We got about five to six miles east on US-34 as the storm was undergoing a new cycle.  Our team was spread out on just about every side of the storm, with us to its east in the path out ahead of Tim and Carl who were basically on the outer fringe of the circulation to our west.  As we slowly pushed east, we saw the development of what would be the big tornado of the day behind us and south of the road.

This funnel either retrograded north toward US-34, or the subsequent touchdown emanated from another area of circulation, which basically planted right on the highway about a mile or so to our west.

Not wanting to end up deploying US into the tornado, we all hopped in the car and jumped back east on US-34, Paul doing his usual hanging out the window to grab the tornado and a curious area of dust from the same vicinity as the original funnel we saw.  This never made a damage survey, but certainly warranted some curiousity.

We felt pretty safe at this point putting another mile or two between us and the tornado.  With Tim basically in the circulation behind us, we were deployed pretty nicely to the east.  We stopped to observe the tornado before dropping out of the chaser congo line to the south of the highway to put us in line with the tornado and measure the inflow.

As we got ourselves east, it looked to us like the tornado was dissipating behind us.  The dust cloud wasn’t nearly as thick and the funnel remained uncondensed, so with us thinking we were watching the end of this tornado, we were going to hop off at the next road less than a mile ahead.

Within about 45 seconds, we arrived at our turn off, M Road.  When we made the south turn, we were very surprised to see a whole different scene unfolding behind us.

We drifted a little south, just to get the tornado north of our line as we assumed it to be moving due east as it remained south of the road without much visual change in north/south in regards to the highway.  We all hopped out and began to spray the tornado with video and pictures.  I, while trying to NOT cut off my video, did a one-hand half-assed series of photos on my Nikon, mostly out of focus, but something on the good camera, at least.

As the tornado had curved more northwest, we opted to push east on the dirt road were on (W 12 Road).  We had a pretty good vantage point as the tornado began to weaken, and started roping out to our immediately north/northwest.

As we were watching the final moments of this tornado, a new circulation developed to our immediate east (southwest of the roping tornado).

Of course we stopped as we were now between two circulations and we didn’t want to take a chance of driving into this in case it grew like the previous one did.

As dark fell, so did our fuel, and despite ongoing tornadic activity, we needed to gas up.  We were low enough where we weren’t sure we’d make it to York, so we ended up at some local station north of Henderson right off the interstate.

As we were fueling up and yapping about the day, we saw what we thought to be a new tornado off to our east.

It was hard to confirm, and it could go either way as our only views were in lightning flashes.  In the moment, it looked more ominous, which could easily be attributed to the day we were coming off of.  But we watched it til it vanished, and as that was happening, the rest of the crew arrived to the truck stop to gas up as we celebrated our incredible day.  Below is an excerpt from Tim’s fielding log discussing our operations for the day…

“Final tornado of the evening was fairly violent producing damage about 5 miles west of Aurora, Nebraska.  Mesonet teams had the tornado surrounded from the west, south, east, and north (probe vehicle) as the tornado moved to the east at a rather slow 10 knot pace.  Preliminary group discussions suggest that this strong tornado was likely the best sampled tornado so far for TWISTEX.

Bruce Lee/Cathy Finley did an astounding job of keep the mesonet vehicles coordinated through the fast-paced, and often dangerous mission.

Huge kudos for the entire TWISTEX team for a job well done!”

I also personally want to give a major shoutout to Paul Samaras who rolled for the ENTIRE chase, filling several hours of tapes with all the footage of this event.  Much of his footage of us from M3, along with the post-chase celebration was featured in the Season 3 finale of Discovery Channel’s “Storm Chasers”, wrapping up our first season with the show on an incredible note.