May 22, 2004 Nebraska wedge


Tonya and I left fairly late planning only to make it to the Salina, KS area. Due to the excellent time we made it to I-80 at York, NE (just north of the target city of Geneva, NE) to find out the extent of the convection over Nebraska and see the convection to our north developing near the front.

We got gas and thought about whether to go west to go after the big storms out there, go after the stuff on the front, or wait in that area for expected development. I talked to a bunch of other chasers who made a variety of decisions. I chose to go west and south to move closer to the west storms. When we reached the Fairfield, NE area when a strong storm started developing to our east.

Making the decision to drop south and then go east after the new storm rather than work west on the "old" storms, we never got into a good position for making good pictures once the tornado started. However, we were able to watch the wedge tornado from some distance once it occurred.

Video of the tornado from our limited view:

CLICK HERE for Windows Media (4MB)
CLICK HERE for REAL Media (3MB)

Here is a video capture: