day 1

sitting in space aliens bar and grill in bismarck. today we got down to east of jamestown and saw a good storm building off to our nw. it was showing a pretty good wall cloud for a while but then the outflow cut off the moist warm inflow. we continued trying to see good storms to the se but they were staying undercut by the outflow. the storm structure was awesome, though. i wonder what else was reported--but it looks like we were near the tail-end charlies. they just didn't have enough inflow (speed, mainly) to really get going, that's fine, though. we saw a supercell today.

actually, on our way back to bismarck, west of jamestown, we pulled off the highway to look at a storm that, although it was in the outflow, was looking kinda impressive. it dropped what appeared to be a wall cloud, but maybe i'm just seeing what i hope to see. whatever it was, it was photogenic and worth stopping for.

now i've gotten everyone here expecting great things, so i certainly hope this place delivers.

all in all, not a bad first day.

tomorrow it looks like south dakota, looking for storms to fire off the upslope flow of the black hills. we'll look at the model output and what the spc decides on and make a decision from there. alberta looks like it could be interesting--a good setup for hailers, but i don't think that we're anywhere close enough. so we'll probably make the south dakota play.

the vans seem divvied up well. chase van 3 is ... interesting, what with some fairly ... shall i say, interesting discussions that will forever stay within the walls of the van. remember the monkey pointing. that's all i have to say about that.

time for beer and ribs. guess which one i'm going to have more of. (6)