When Roger Hill told us about the parameters of our last day he had a hard time hiding his excitement. The setup was just magnificent for a big event! The morning of our chase day I had a beautiful walk by the South Platte river (North Platte, Nebraska) with intense southern winds and I was trying to keep my hopes for the day in check. When we had our morning briefing it seemed a little bit worse than anticipated, which is never a good sign.
We went out to Broken Arrow, Nebraska, to position ourselves in the bullseye where the best potential were and waited. The storms took time to get going so we waited and waited. Storms were firing but never really grew into supercells and it was not until around 7 p.m. when a storm started intensifying rapidly only to just suddenly die off as well. As this day had the best parameters of the week and it was the last chase day of the tour I felt really disappointed. Far too often you get excellent setups that just turn into nothing which is quite tough! Worse yet, Roger told me that the next week is looking really bad with a ridge coming in over the central plains. So, when we started our 5 hour drive back to Denver I was a bit depressed with a feeling of “Was this it for 2018?”.
As a last treat, as we drove away from the MCS that has been created, we encounted the most amazing mammatus I have ever seen. Just look at it!
