April 27, 2025

The moons aligned and both Brindley and I had a couple days free from our busy schedules to chase what looked like two decent shots on the Plains. The first was a conditional dryline supercell play on the western Plains on Sunday, April 27. It was my first out of state run for the season, and Brindley's first chase since 2023 after she took the '24 season off entirely. It was great to have her back, and we were hoping for some pretty, yet less stressful chases to ease back into it and knock the rust off.

Brindley and I met up the day before in the Quad Cities and stopped in Des Moines for the night. A moderately unstable dryline with southwest flow just starting to nose in from a trough well to the west made for decent shear profiles when combined with the strengthening low level jet. It was a nice setup if we could get a couple storms to fire off the dryline, but lift was a limiting factor with the lagging trough, and the CAMs were worryingly quiet. One bullish model showed a few isolated dryline supercells and SPC’s vote of confidence with 5% tornado probabilities was enough to get us to pull the trigger and continue the long drive to far southwest Nebraska. McCook was our initial target, the top of the dryline where low-level instability was maximized and hopefully convergence for initiation.

We made good time and wound up hedging on our target slightly, continuing down I-80 where it turns back northwest to North Platte instead of dropping south to McCook. Initiation along the Colorado/Kansas/Nebraska corner looked possible and we didn’t want to be out of play by committing to a target upstream to the south. We spent much of the afternoon hanging out at a gas station, watching the visible satellite and the colorful locals, which included a couple that was yelling at each other between vehicles.

A cell fired in the Nebraska Panhandle, and we watched it closely, but it really struggled to get going, and then looked like it may have been tracking into a cooler, less favorable environment. However, Mesoanalysis indicated a bubble of CAPE would be migrating north through the day, potentially putting the cell into a better environment by evening. We held out hope for more favorable dryline initiation to our south and relocated to a park on a lake just south of town, the same one I had hung out with the Anton, Tracie, Carsten, and Hank the previous year. The dryline cumulus thinned out and it was becoming apparent initiation was not going to happen. The Panhandle cell was tracking for the sparse roads of the Sandhills and now looked like a rather sloppy complex, but was slowly growing in intensity. An intercept on that cell was almost two hours away now, after we had been watching it for a couple hours already from North Platte. We decided not to pursue it as we’d arrive with not much daylight left and then be in the middle of the nowhere by nightfall. We called the chase and drove back north into town to make for I-80 east, just as the Sandhills storm picked up a tornado warning. Chasing solo, I might have gone through the frustrating and futile exercise of running after it, arriving late and missing the show. But we both agreed we just weren’t in position and weren’t going to make the desperate move, so continued on to Grand Island for the night and to get a head start on the Day 2 target which could potentially be as far as Minneapolis.