Elevated storms in South Dakota

JUNE 3 DAY 8

We left North Platte to target central South Dakota. On our way north, we ran into Tim Marshall who was with Silver Lining Tours at a gas station in some very small town in Cherry county, which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Off to our northeast, some towers were building along a surface boundary so we decided to go for that. We headed northeast past Pierre, South Dakota. As we got closer to the storms, we could tell they were elevated. We watched a microburst occur, then decided to drive more north behind the storms. There really wasn’t any storm structure features going on, so we cut through the line of storms to get ahead of them to see if there was a decent shelf cloud. Unfortunately there really wasn’t much going on ahead of the storms either. It was getting pretty windy, and we saw a little bit of hail shafts.

We decided to call it quits for the day as seeing that this was all that would happen today. On our way back to Pierre, we saw a dust devil off in the distance, and several road runner birds near the road. At first, Ron and I thought Scott was actually going to hit one, but he slowed down so it could finish crossing the road. Off to our west, I noticed an outflow boundary forming. Thunderstorm cells were starting to grow fast along the outflow boundary, so by the time we reached Pierre, we had a small thunderstorm to our north, with some mammatus. In the motel parking lot, I attempted lightning photography but it was quite difficult with the in-cloud lightning and city lights. We had a severe thunderstorm watch until 4 am.