After Hays we ventured once again to the Dakotas for our last official chase of the season. We spent a few days in Sioux Falls, SD which is a quaint little town in Southeastern SD. We had one really good chase day where we woke up to a 15% tornado contour by the Storm Prediction Center and a moderate risk. We really thought that Father's Day would be the day we would finally get to deploy our pods. But alas, we were left with some beautifully structured supercells and possibly a brief touchdown or two. Actually...it was a little more exciting than that in Scout 1. We yet again drove into the circulation of a tornado genesis. We were a bit ahead of the pack and ended up right under the lowering wall cloud. Visibility went to zero in a split second and our truck was pushed into the next lane by a huge wind gust. Our data from the anemometer showed about a 90mph peak wind. We thought at first it was maybe just a gust front or downdraft because these storms were getting undercut by outflow and gusted out pretty quickly; but sure enough radar data showed a tornado had touched down right by us. The next town over received some minor damage.
The next day was a down day so we headed to the zoo! The Great Plains Zoo is a neat little attraction I would recommend to anyone passing through this area. They had a lot of really cool animals and so many of them had babies! Later that night we caught a laser light show at the Sioux Falls Park. If you have ever seen the laser light show they have at Stone Mountain, GA, it was a bit like that but it told the story of how that area of South Dakota came to be. It was very informative but the falls are absolutely stunning. Not so huge, but the red quartz is really spectacular.
Today we called end of mission for CSWR! But I am not done just yet! Marcus and I are giving it one last stand out here near the SD/ND/MN borders so, fingers crossed, more to come!
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