Today, we disembarked from Valparaiso, Indiana, and headed west towards Omaha, Nebraska! This is the beginning of a field study that undergraduate meteorology students like me can participate in, where we follow and study thunderstorms across the central U.S. We will be out for the next 11 days tracking these storms and analyzing their life cycle, interactions, and the atmospheric environments they develop in.
At the moment, quiet weather conditions were found throughout the Great Plains, so we traveled across Illinois and Iowa until we made it to Omaha, NE. On Wednesday, active weather is looking to return in Nebraska and the Dakota’s but until then, sightseeing and hiking are on the agenda! However, while enjoying our lunch in Peru, IL, we observed so beautiful lenticular clouds!
All in all, I am excited to be on this trip with 15 of my colleagues and can’t wait to see what kind of storms we can find!