So we left the hotel early, killed the miles on Interstate 80 and had some lunch at Grand Island before taking the North East road there to be in Norfolk (Nebraska) in plenty of time, we found the warm front quite easily and sat there watching towers go up and down for ages. A tornado watch was issued around 3pm and there was already a line of strong to severe storms that had initiated in the morning in Northern Kansas already encroaching into the South west part of the Tornado Watch Box.
So already we had a decision to make wether to sit out the Warm Front play or to head Southwards to take a peek at these storms that were nearing Columbus. What I did was to split the difference, head half way south and keep both options in play and this worked perfectly as half way into the trip south we had explosive initiation along the warm front 11 miles to our East, and with a prefect east road in 1 mile we went for the warm front, our fledgling storm was only about 40 miles in front of the line though so time was very limited.
Initially our developing storm looked like junk with 3 or 4 laminar bands struggling to get anything going but it quickly picked up and as it crossed the warm front started to look amazing structure wise, a beautiful Classic Supercell was in front of us with a layered cake appearance, a nice rain free base and wall cloud appeared and the storm quickly went tornado warned, now the big problem!!!
Our storm was moving at 5mph whereas the line behind was doing 45mph and quickly catching our storm, we had about 45 minutes to see if this lovely Supercell could get the job done, unfortunately it could not and the rest is history with the structure dissapearing within 10 minutes and the whole line morphing into a eastward moving MCS. That equalled Game Over and we headed east to Blair to let the line overtake us as we ate in a nice BBQ Bar with Skip Talbot.
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