On the Road Again

The last 2 days have really been uneventful, in terms of chasing. After making a few pitstops along the way from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma at Pop's Restaurant on Route 66 (Pop's Webpage) and the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (Cosmosphere Webpage) we ended up in Salina, Kansas for the night.

The giant soda bottle that stands in front of POP's.

A never ending wall of a million and one differnt kinds of "pop" at POP's on Route 66 in Arcadia, Kansas.

The drive from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Salina, Kansas took roughly 3 hours and 37 minutes and was a 247 mile drive. I'm pretty sure we are really close to hitting the 2,000 mile mark on our trip, if we haven't already.

For some reason, yesterday was a pretty stressful day. I definitely felt a bit anxious by the time we got to our hotel for the night. The last 2 days of hotel searching has been pretty rough, looking for a hotel for 10 people at a reasonable rate is not as easy as one would think it is. Searching for hotels for 2 hours and not coming up with anything because half of them do not have availability and the other half is too expensive, is slightly stressful, especially when your not just trying to find a room for yourself but a whole group of people. Thankfully Jason came to the rescue and found us one, because my efforts were an epic fail. He found a pretty great place to stay for the evening.

Moving on to todays events! We met this morning to talk about our plans for today. Again, our chasing options are pretty minimal and almost out of reach. There is is a slight risk up near the extreme northwestern corner of Nebraska, but it doesn't seem we will make it there in time. It's an 8 hour drive, meaning we wouldn't get there until around 5pm tonight, which leaves us a small chase window before sundown. Right now the general plan is to head up toward Hastings, Nebraska, which is in the see text area for the Day 1 convective outlook. The drive from Salina to Hastings is about 168 miles and 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Our plan for today. We might actually get more north than this, but Hastings is where we plan to regroup.

This is the Day 1 Convection outlook. We are aiming to be in the green area in Nebraska. The yellow area is a bit out of reach, unfortunately.

Once we get to Hastings we will regroup and figure out what direction we need to go in order to get into position to catch a storm if we can. At the meeting this morning we talked about how hit and miss these storms will be today. Jason mentioned how the storms will be elevated storms and short-lived. They will rain themselves out in about an hour or so, therefore catching up with one will prove to be difficult.

Right now we are on the road heading to Hastings. We are heading north on 81 in Nebraska. The group just made a pitstop at a gas station on 81 to look at CAPE, CIN, 500 mb vorticity, and visual satellite. After taking a look at that, we see that Hastings has a lot of CIN and is lacking in CAPE. There is a Cumulus field that is in Colorado now, that we are keeping an eye on. The purpose of that is to see where the Cumulus field is heading via visible satellite and look for places east of it where CAPE values would be sufficient enough to help some storms fire. Unfortunately, in our case CAPE isn't looking too good. We will keep a close eye on the conditions as we move closer to Hastings, which is about an hour and half away from our current position. 

While you wait for an update on our plans and position, enjoy a photo of our exciting scenery.

Our never ending view of nothing.