Woke up this morning and was none too pleased to see the atomic cap that was going to be parked over eastern CO all day so I was pretty convinced we wouldn’t be heading out.  A few models like the NAM, and 4km WRF did show storms breaking out later in the day but the GFS, HRRR, and RUC kept a lid on things.  After Dann and I mulled it over we decided to keep our eyes on the cap and if it looked like it was eroding, we would venture out on a local chase.  Sure enough as the afternoon progressed, the cap started to fade and a few other models finally broke out precip around 22z.  We were on the road by 3:00 and met up with Ryan Kushner at the rendezvous point.  We went E down I-70 and got off at the Airpark road exit where we had a good vantage point to see if any storms were going to fire.  Ehh, not so much.  We noticed a few specks on radar forming up around I-76 near Prospect Valley so we went up that way.  After sitting in Hudson for awhile a few cells started to go up to the N of us.  We got ahead of them on 76 and got off at Ft. Morgan and then proceeded north and west through New Raymer eventually settling on Buckingham to take some photo’s.  This ended up being the highlight of the day as the storms we got ahead of never really took off.  It was a good photo op though.  So here are my favorites!

So anyway, I was pleased with the photo’s.  We then tailed this storm E toward Sterling hoping to get some lightning photo’s but it wasn’t in the cards.  So we got into Sterling and enjoyed our favorite chase fast food being burgers and tots from Sonic.  And that’s all she wrote!

Chase Stats:

Mileage – 365

Total 2010 Mileage – 10,625

Tornadoes – 0

2010 Tornadoes – 14

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