Given the success of yesterday and my desire to have a full day at home in front of my TV watching football (namely the afternoon Washington/Dallas game), I have decided to sit out today.  CAMs are hit and miss on initiation, mainly in the timing, with many not popping storm(s) til at/after 7pm.  While the potential for a VERY discrete supercell exists, it will likely be fairly late, leaving a short daytime window to see much of anything.  Add to that the fact that most are initiating near the KS border, meaning it’s a nearly 3-hour haul just to get out there, and it would require a super late drive or an overnight stop.  All that weighs too heavy for a narrow window of daytime chasing.  If the tornado threat were higher, I could make a case, but I think it’s more of a hailer-type deal.  Certainly, a sunset tornado would be epic, but I am going to play the odds and say unlikely.

I have obligations tomorrow; a HUGE Washington Football game, and lets be real, yesterday was super awesome all on its own where I am completely satisfied and feel I earned my day on the couch in front of the TV.  I missed most of Week 1 Football last week for a sub-par chase venture, so I am going to take yesterday to the bank and enjoy my Sunday at home.

A decent, two-minute tornado, a brief birdfart landspout, intense accumulating hail, and some fantastic lightning shots!  It was the Holy Chase Trifecta!  I have posted the placeholder for the log and I will get the write-up done, hopefully here in the next day or two.  But a incredibly over-performing day, despite the HRRR nailing the supercell, a lot of crazy things went down.  The hail in this storm was reported up to 3″, but I didn’t see anything bigger than just over an inch, but what fell came down hard and heavy, accumulating along I-70 and making a slog of a drive.  Still managed to get on the east side of it, documenting hail aftermath, then the first landspout spun up from a developing storm north of Vona, then when shooting structure and (attempting for) lightning, a storm that had developed ahead of the main supercell south of Bethune merged with the main storm, and a decent looking tornado came out of it, lasted about two minutes before it got knocked out.  Ran the storm to Burlington before flipping back west, but more small, non-severe storms fired along the interstate and offered the final piece of the trifecta, some great lightning!  Just continue to add awesome shots to this year’s haul!

Plenty to go over in the log, but it’s 12:47am and I have a FULL DAY OF FOOTBALL TOMORROW!!  SPC has a slight risk out for Limon and points east, and the HRRR has been very optimistic about a couple supercells out that way, so its NOT out of the question I coax myself back out, but I got more than my fill today.  Ironically enough, there was NO tornado risk on Saturday, but a 2% for tomorrow.  So yeah, I will see how it looks in the morning and decide if it’s worth passing a football day on the couch.  Problem is, Washington/Dallas, so that’s a biggie. haha It’s also the afternoon game, so I can’t go out after.  So yeah, we shall see.

That said, I’m off to bed!  Ciao for now!

Not much to speak of from this recent two-day chase trip… enough so where neither day will get a written log out of the deal, but alas, that’s how it goes sometimes.  I have rolled back home safely and have updated the books and I continue to move 2026 further and further up the ranking list… as of the end of this most recent trip, here are where my numbers sit in the annual rankings starting back in 2002, and what it would take to move into the top 3 and the first place overall.

It’s not far-fetched to think I could hit #1 in several of those stats… namely the number of chases and perhaps even making a run at #1 miles, although that would require a bit more than I think would be expected at this point in the season.  Hitting #2 overall in miles is almost a slam-dunk, I would think as it’s only 582 miles from 2011, which held the #1 spot til 2023 was my first over-40K season.  Basically one round trip outside of the state would get me to #2.  While hitting #1 seems unlikely (not impossible), I can see a scenario where I do make my second run over 40,000 miles in year, so we’ll see if that accomplishment comes to pass or not.  But I think we can put some even money bets on hitting #2 in miles.  Tornado chases and tornado days are not surprising when you look at the sheet, but they were a lot of one-birdfart days; the tornado year on a quality note was bad, as I’ve discussed at length already.  The quality was there, certainly in the number of days, but that is only stat-padding the tables.  Three more tornadoes, regardless of quality, would get me into the Top 10, which right now that being the only thing outside the top 10.  And again, it’s all numbers haha

One note on the grand-scale of miles, it’s definitely now highly likely I cross 600,000 career miles next year as I have moved within 27,000 miles, sitting now at 573,400 career miles as of this last trip.  I hit the 500K mark in June of 2024, so this would be among the quickest progressions to accumulate 100,000 miles, which the fastest three calendar years were 2022-2024 where I did 101,495 miles between those three seasons.  And right now, if you could 2025 and 2026, I am within 34,000 miles of having another three-year 100K stint.  I’d have to look specifically at chases and dates to really hammer that down, but I am well on pace right now to have another 3-year, 100K stint.  Regardless, hitting 600,000 miles next year is growing in likelihood. A far cry from my 2018-2020 stint where I did just over 28K miles.

So yeah, stats for you numbers nerds!  Or me, the true numbers nerd!  When will I add to those totals?  Maybe the next day or two… we’ll see how the Fall season shakes out.  But alas, 2026, ON PAPER, continues its climb in the rankings that go back to 2002.

Sleeper may be giving too much credit to day’s setup, but 24 hours ago, this was going to be a one-and-done trip… then today started sneaking in to some of the hi-rez model runs, and I went to bed last night thinking we could eek out one more day today.  This morning’s runs continued to show the northwest Missouri potential, so given the less-than-three-hour haul down I-29 from here in Omaha, we’ve elected to go ahead and make it so.

SPC maintains a marginal risk from the extent of the front today, and I guess it’s not out of the question they put a low-end slight to cover for this potential, but CAMs continue to show some organized storms across northwest Missouri starting mid-afternoon and trailing east across northern Missouri.  They may be a little over-zealous, and honestly I hunch they are, but it’s kind of a chase of convenience seeing as it’s close to where I am now and still sticks me on a straight shot home Wednesday.

Yesterday’schase in southeast Nebraska didn’t amount to much… most social media chasers were VERY optimistic in yesterday’s 5% hatched, I was much less so, and it played out as expected.  Most of the good stuff happened earlier and much further southwest, so it was another shelf cloud chase.  I followed storms into Iowa and snagged a couple low-end stat-padder lightning shots as the storms moved further into Iowa before coming up here to Omaha to hedge my bet on chasing today.  Yesterday didn’t leave a high bar behind, so it won’t take much to better things today, and thus, I am going to post here, pack up, and hit the road for a rainy drive south toward St. Joseph and see how that afternoon shakes out today.

Waking up this morning in Grand Island after yesterday’s football-filled drive (Washington lost to the Eagles by 2 in a more competitive game than I figured, but a loss is a loss), about 2-3 hours from my early afternoon target.  As usual, I will land in that target by 3pm, which probably oughta be more than enough time to settle and wait for the afternoon show.

I probably should post a current grab of the radar, but that’s more effort than this Monday morning is going to get out of me.  Trust me when I say there is a LOT of rain/storms along the Missouri River from Omaha into Iowa, which is one of MANY issues plaguing what would otherwise be a pretty solid chase setup.  We knew this going in, there was never any real doubt in waking up to a complicated forecast today, and we have just that.  It’s 9am CDT now, so it’s gonna take a quick recovery in the wake of these storms for things to start making sense.

We’ve heard this a million times this year, the environment in place supports significant severe weather, including the potential for strong tornadoes…

BUT…

And that’s today in a nutshell… the parameters in place could support significant severe weather, but will recovery happen in time, will storms stay isolated long enough, will storm be surfaced based… the list goes on and on.  And 99 times out of 100 this year, the buts have won out to some degree or another.  It’s basically having all the ingredients for an awesome cake spread out across the kitchen counter with an oven pre-heating to 400… but you don’t put the ingredients together correctly, you forget an ingredient, or add too much or too little, or you don’t cook it long enough and set the temperature too low.  That’s today… a lot is there, but there are a lot more failure modes than there are successes, and while the potential is there, will it be realized.

And that’s what I am here to find out… it’s September 4, the chase chances are going to dwindle heading into the winter, and this is a reasonable distance for a setup of this caliber, so we shall see.  My gut, which is probably the one thing in my body right now I SHOULD be paying more attention to, isn’t terribly high on today, but there are hi-rez models that do play out the ‘all the ingredients come together’ scenario, so we’ll put the chips on the table and see what hand Ma-Nature deals.

Right now, my plan is to sit tight, probably a milk-the-checkout morning here in Grand Island, then slide my way to the east.  It’s hard to fight the urge to wanna get on the other side of the river into Iowa, maybe over to Missouri Valley, but I think if the window were to exist, it’s gonna be early and probably be in Nebraska.  That being said, I’m leaning toward Blair, about 2.5 hours, which means if I am mobile by noon, I will get there in plenty of time, and if Iowa looks legit, I can zip over there via US-30 with no issues.

So that said, a big boom/bust type of day with more busts than booms, but all it takes is one boom, so folks in the risk area today, stay weather aware!  I’ll be out to do my part to chase away the storms haha