Welcome everyone to my 2017 storm chasing adventure! Brought to you by the Tornadic Wind and Thunderstorm Seekers…AKA Sean, Dan, Peter and Ang. 

Day one is over and it seems like we are going to have a quiet start to the week- but hopefully a little more excitement by Tuesday.

Saturdays convective outlook

As you can see from the SPCs convective outlook the risk of severe thunderstorms was pretty low. However a marginal risk doesn’t mean no storms- just a low probability- making the chase much harder.

Our expert forcaster Dan however was optimistic and we set our sights on South Dakota. Setting out from Denver towards Keystone via beautiful Wyoming.

Filling up this years chase car somewhere in Wyoming. A Suburban may be overkill.

After 300 miles we came across the first hint of some convection.

An emerging anvil cloud near the lovely little town of Custer SD

With time on our side we made a quick detour to tick off an item from my US bucket list.

Some fossilized presidents

Proof I was there!

It turned out MT Rushmore was a pretty good spot to watch the first storm of the day approach- unfortunately the Black Hills also make a pretty big obstacle for storms forming to the west. 

The white line is the approaching strom track- the blue circle is me at MT Rushmore

After the storm approached us and fell apart over the hills we left for a couple of storms developing to the South. Neither were severe warned but well worth chasing.

My preferred target for the afternoon- AKA Sean’s storm

We found our selves between 2 interesting storms a d opted for the closest first. The South Dakota terrain made it difficult to get a good look at the full structure of the storm and data coverage was sketchy. Trial and error was the theme for the day!

Up close with Dan’s preferred storm

We caught up with our first target storm by around 4pm and caught a few lightning bolts and precipitation from the only vantage point for miles.

After watching for a while we decided to change our tact and head South to what appeared to be a well organized storm in clean air and away from annoying hills!

Up close with my storm

After heading south to catch a closer look with the Las storm of our Chase we decided to call it a day. The storms today were small and not likely to produce any severe weather, time for dinner in hot springs!

Just a very pretty view

After arriving in Hot Springs our stop for the night and home to Woolys, the best Mammoth themed restaurant I have ever eaten at we had one more surprise from todays storms- a rather spectacular display of Mammatus.

Some impressive Mammatus

We could be in for a stormy night.

Looking at the outlook for the next 2 days its going to be a slow start, but hopefully some proper chasing action by Tuesday.