Happy Birthday to Me!!!!

 Tornadoes: 0
Wind: 60 knots
Hail: 1.5 inches (golfball), some larger

So June 24th is my birthday, and not only did my folks come out to Rapid City to visit me, we got slammed by an awesome storm!!! A mesocyclone was over my apartment, we got very heavy rain and lightning, but we also got some big butt hail that was between 1.5 and 2 inches in diameter. I was a very happy chicka.

© Heather Caye 2011

 Storm in the distance. This was not the one that hit Rapid City (it was to the east of town).

Storm as it was moving in.

 Storm getting closer.

Some of the hail that fell from the storm.  This storm dumped hail for about 15 minutes.

Closer view of the hail.

June 20th, 2011 Chase

Tornadoes: 0
Hail: Pea
Wind: 60 knots
Falling tree branches on car: 1

This was a very interesting chase, as we were close to seeing a tornado, but could not find it. Our target for the day was Norfolk, NE.  We left early that morning and got down to near Norfolk. We kept an eye on the radar for a while and before we knew it, there were storms firing to our southwest, one of them which spawned multiple tornadoes on the Nebraska-Kansas border.  We drove after the storms and after a while, they started turning to more HP supercells and became more mushy (what a surprise).  We then ended up on one cell that we thought may produce, but she did not.  After we gave up on that one, another small storm developed to our south but that one quickly weakened.  Even though we did not see any tornadoes, we saw some very frequent lightning, a tree branch fell on our car, and we even got some small hail.  In addition, the sky looked like sorbet :)

© Heather Caye 2011

 The sorbet-colored sky :)

 There was some slight rotation with these clouds but nothing happened.

 This was the storm to our south as it was developing.

 One of the lightning strikes that I captured.

 This was an interesting stroke.

 Awesome CG lightning stroke.

 I wonder what it hit?

This is totally awesome.

June 16, 2011 Chase

Tornadoes: 0
Hail: Marble
Wind: 60 knots

This was a local chase for us since we were only a few hours away from home.  Around noon, we drove south to Scottsbluff, NE and ran into a nice severe thunderstorm. Unfortunately, my camera was in the trunk and so I did not get any good pictures. However, I did get some cool video. We saw a cloud lowering but no tornado. We just saw some dust blowing, hail, and a LOT of rain.

© Heather Caye 2011