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MAY 22, 2004: Saturday - Jefferson County NE tornadoes
By Brian Morganti

I'm way too tired to go into a detailed post, but hear are the basics. We couldn't leave OKC until the last guest arrived, which meant we wouldn't arrive near our target area until after 6:00 PM. Keith Brown and myself decided the best thing to do was to head straight north on I-35 and 81 to the NE/KS border, and hope for a late storm initiation along the southern edge of the risk area. Before we even reached the border a supercell well off to our WNW had produced a nice tornado (congratulations to Matt & Betsy) on the southern most storm in a cluster of severe and tornado warned storms near Red Willow County NE. The tornadic storm was moving ENE and became our target storm...unless something else caught our attention nearby. Soon after that a storm went up near Columbus and became tornado warned. Bill Reid and his group targeted that storm, which looked pretty good on radar at times. Around 6:30 PM a new echo return showed up directly to our north and began to intensify rapidly. This storm was the southern most storm and was probably in the axis of greatest instability, so we knew this one had an excellent potential to become tornadic. Within 15 minutes it became severe warned, and then tornado warned. We went as far north as Hebron and then proceeded east on highway 136. We stopped briefly for a quick assessment of the developing meso near Gilead.

We knew we had to blast north as this storm was intensifying and picking up speed. We went north on highway 53 to highway four and were treated to plenty of orange blowing dust and a very nasty looking lowering developing directly to our north, which soon became a large low contrast wedge tornado at 7:25 PM CDT.

Soon after, we cut east on highway 4 and confirmed our first tornado sighting just east of Daykin around 7:29 PM CDT to our NNE. The sirens were going off as we went thru Daykin and we continued to film the ghostly white tornado to our north. An awesome and rapidly rotating collar cloud was encircling the tornado at this point! Contrast wasn't the greatest, but it got better the further east we went. The mostly cone shaped tornado remained visible with occasional touch downs directly to our north for the next 12 miles, and we even had two tornadoes hanging from a large wrapping wall cloud at one point.

We then drove north on highway 103 towards Dewitt and watched as the tornado crossed the road in front of us. There was an intense RFD to our northwest that was kicking up huge amounts of dust. We were forced to retreat at least once on our northward trek due to blinding dust and horizontal rain and hail.

We called off the chase in the town of DeWitt due to darkness as the storm moved rapidly off to our east. We finished up the day filming a nice display of lightning south of Beatrice.

What an awesome day...especially considering my late departure! 500 + miles logged.

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