Good morning from Gillette, Wyoming. This is as far northwest as any of us have overnighted on a chase trip. We left Scottsbluff, NE after lunch and visited Scottsbluf Nat’l Monument for a little sightseeing. The views from atop the bluffs are pretty amazing… what a great location to watch a supercell from! Here’s a group shot overlooking the city of Scottsbluff:
L to R: Matt Crowther, Stacie Hanes, Steve Wachholder, yours truly, Jay Antle, (Papa Cyclone) Jim Leonard
We then set off for the Devil’s Tower Nat’l Monument arriving there around and hour and a half or so before sunset. The drive up there was quite nice actually, it’s amazingly green out here in northeastern Wyoming. Some of the spring snows have really helped this area out. A marginal supercell thunderstorm developed northwest of Broadus, MT which was visible to our distant NNW from about 150 miles away. It was amazing I was able to hold a digital cell signal and download data at numerous points during the drive from Lusk to Sundance, WY. As we approached Devil’s Tower, that particular storm was weakening somewhat:
We spent a couple hours touring around and photographing Devil’s Tower. We were fortunate enough to have some cirrus clouds and good low sunlight to make the scenes more photogenic:
We arrived at our expensive Clarion Hotel (the only decent place we could find with available rooms given Memorial Day Weekend approaching and being on the interstate halfway between two of the most popular tourist destinations in the country — the Black Hills and Yellowstone.
Today (Day 4, Fri 5/26) looks like a chase day. We will be playing far southeastern Montana it looks like. I think a supercell storm can develop in the area northeast of Billings to Broadus… along the deep layer baroclinic zone. We should see CAPE values around 1000 to 1500 J/kg I think. The forcing will be better than yesterday, so I think there’ll be more storms. We already have reservations for Dickinson, ND in anticipation for what looks like a pretty good Day 5 (Sat 5/27). Jon, Rob, and Mitch will be driving up from Kansas City beginning tonight and will join us for Saturday’s chase. More later!