First Storm Chase

I went on my first storm chase ever and it was a blast! Dann Cianca, Jeff Auger and I headed out to northeastern CO on Sunday September 21, to try to catch some storms firing off of the advancing trough from the Pacific. As the afternoon went on we observed lots of convection to our north up in Nebraska panhandle and decided to engage on an intercept. Our target area was Sidney NE with a severe warned mesocyclone supercell just north of the town. As we got closer to our target it was advancing ESE just north of Oshkosh NE. We continued to pursue our target storm even though our road network was getting less opportunistic and daylight was getting shorter. As we headed north of Lisco we noticed our storm was weakening and a large rain and hail shaft spilled out behind the main core. We were loosing our chance of an intercept with a dissipating storm. At this moment we decided to end the chase of this beautiful storm but were thrilled that we had the chance to watch the evolution of this storm. What a wonderful site!! As we started to head back towards home we came across some mature storms giving off cloud-to-ground lightning at the CO/NE border. We stopped along the road to capture some amazing lightning filling the night sky. After an hour and a half we decided we had captured our fill of lightning photos and decided to pack it on home. After 12 hours of traveling and observing the wonderful landscape we were satisfied with our successful chase.