A much better chase day on May 27th in North Dakota! We intercepted storms northeast of Bismarck, one of which becoming a meaty supercell between Wing and Regan. The structure on this supercell was quite nice. We followed this north until it weakened, and as it shriveled up, there was visible rotation at cloud base…with even a nascent funnel it appeared looking WSW towards the shrinking updraft area near the Florence Lake NWR. At Denhoff we travelled west to catch the backside of these storms. We almost drove into a 72 VIL core (golfball hail or larger), but thanks to a timely radar update, we obviously reconsidered going south on Hwy 41 at Mercer… and optioned farther west dropping south on 200 Alternate to Washburn. The backside of the supercells were very photogenic with just incredible deep saturated colors of pink, violet, blue, orage… you name it. It was stunning color contrast right at sunset. We ran into very brief quarter size hail just northwest of Wilton then decided to stop off at the intersection of Hwy 83 and Hwy 36 to photograph lightning from the southern most supercell that was over Mandan-Bismarck.
We are in Bismarck this morning and plan to leave here probably around 10am for a target near the SD-NE line west or northwest of Valentine, NE?
