Operations on Tuesday and Wednesday

In spite of a pattern that is the antithesis of what you want for severe weather (someone didn't get the memo and gave us a wicked ridge over the central US instead of a nice trough!) V2 has been running operations the past two days. Storms have been weak and poorly organized at best, leading to challenges in terms of targeting a given storm and some definite frustration among the teams. We've been launching balloons, both in the pre-storm environment, as well as near some of the storms, so if nothing else we're getting some practice launching in a variety of conditions.

Yesterday we ran sounding ops from the parking lot of a Cabela's outdoor store in Sydney, NE (I'm still kicking myself for not volunteering to be the early deployment team for that one!). Which lead to some nice photo-ops with the statue of battling Caribou out front.
Today, we were further north in the Nebraska sand hills operating between Alliance and Hyannis NE. For those of you New Englanders reading this, Hyannis, NE is nothing like Hyannis, MA, and we'll leave it at that. The storms weren't all that exciting and we ended up switching targets a few times trying to find something decent to go after. We're still waiting to get a good supercell deployment....any day now, I'm sure : p.

On a brighter note, though, I had two VUSIT sightings today while on the road (that's the Valparaiso University Storm Intercept Team for those not in the know). Hopefully our path's will cross at some point over the next few weeks when one of us isn't traveling at 70 mph so we can say hi!