We had a long drive ahead of us today if we were to see any storm action today. After spending another night at our hotel in Colby, North Kansas, we had to travel over 300 miles north through Nebraska and into South Dakota. We set off fairly early and, en route, booked the coming night's hotel in Valentine, right in the north of Nebraska and close to the South Dakota border. Today was the first properly hot day, and temperatures easily broke the 30 Celsius barrier under clear blue skies. This was amidst an unrelating southerly wind though, which was gusting in excess of 40mph. We reached Valentine in Cherry County by late afternoon and checked in.

We then continued our journey north into South Dakota to reach the town of Murdo in Jones County. Just east of here, we had our very own UK storm chaser convergence and spent some time chatting to Pete Scott and Steve Lansdale who were chasing in the area. By this time, a huge tornadic supercell had erupted some 100 miles to our north and this dropped a violent wedge tornado. Disappointed but not downbeat, we decided to hover in the area as a collision was taking place between an eastward-moving cold front and the dry line boundary which was wobbling a little westward. High based thunderstorms developed along the cold front which we observed just north of Murdo. One particular LP (low precipitation) thunderstorm seemed to be trying its best to form into a supercellular storm but it wasn't to be.

By mid evening, thunderstorms were erupting to our south on the cold front-dry line collision and storms were rapidly becoming severe. We quickly dropped south and then east in order to get ahead of the northeast-moving cells. By 9:30pm as the light was disappearing, temperatures ahead of the cold front were still in excess of 28C and the most incredible light show commenced. Thunderstorms to our south were now tornado warned and were forming a solid north-south line as they moved towards us. We took position at a high vantage point near Chamberlain and observed constant lightning (literally a flash per second). We dropped a little further east to stay ahead of the precipitation core and set up our lightning-watching position once more. It wasn't long before the storm outflowed in our direction and we took shelter under another garage canopy. There was some hail amongst the torrential rain, largely pea size but with the odd larger stone too. CGs were ferocious overhead and were just as frequent as earlier.

Eventually, the storm rumbled off to the east and we started the long journey back to Valentine. We were hungry but had to remain so, as nowhere was open for food by this time. It wasn't until 2am that we arrived into our hotel, worn out but happy with the outcome of the day's chase, even if we did miss the tornadoes.