Cheyenne, WY | 5/28/2018

This was a tough one. We began the day in Eastern Nebraska, and it wasn’t for a lack of effort. A few days earlier, we had set up camp in Minneapolis, expecting a relatively quiet weak and planning to take things day by day. The pattern was not truly conducive to tornadoes – as you probably already know, the 2018 season was insanely quiet, and our week was appearing to be no different.

Things would end up changing rather quickly. About 24 hours prior, while conducting standard analysis, it became clear that a small tornado threat would evolve in Eastern Wyoming and perhaps parts of Colorado on May 28th. With nothing to lose, we decided to leave Minneapolis the evening prior, which led us into Nebraska by the morning of May 28th.

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We were playing catch-up on this storm by the time it rolled off the higher terrain, but doing it well. The systems structure quickly became apparent and we knew we were in a good position. We did make an interesting decision to stay to the Southeast of the storm – which ended up obscuring our view quite a bit. The structure of the storm changed dramatically in very short periods of time, as it almost appeared to cycle a bit before turning into a full blown HP.

Still, we were able to view a very distinct and well formed tornado from the Southeast for about 5 minutes. This ended up verifying as an EF-1 tornado, and a few other chasers who approached it from the opposite angle  were able to get a much better view. After several minutes we were greeted by a beautiful rotating HP core, followed by 50-60mph wind gusts. They were chilly wind gusts too, with air flowing in right off the mountains.

Our forecast from May 27th – with severe weather reports overlayed

We were able to escape the large hail and get a (relatively distant) view of a tornado. Not bad for the first chase day of our trip! As mentioned, we also were fortunate enough to view a very impressive rotating supercell with high precipitation characteristics.

There was very large hail reported here, so we were glad to be standing relatively far away from it. This was one of the main reasons we chose the eastern side of the system.