Montana Mammatus: June 8, 2018

This chase day was all over the map. I started in central South Dakota, as I was leaning toward targeting a warm front somewhere in the vicinity of southwestern Minnesota, but kept options farther west open. Due to wanting to chase Alberta the next day and a fairly uncertain outcome to the east, I ended up favoring the more unanimous target near Rapid City.

In fairly textbook fashion for the area, a supercell formed over the Black Hills and gradually moved east and then southeast. While this storm was interesting at first, I was more intrigued by new storms forming to the east near the Badlands.

I raced east and encountered what looked like a massive supercell on radar. The storm was producing large to locally very large hail. Although I liked the looks of the storm at first, it quickly morphed into a convective system with strong outflow winds, suggesting any tornado threat was rapidly diminishing.

After I noted this, I turned around and headed northwest, to get into position for the following day and possibly to catch a storm or two before sunset. As fate would have it, I ended up all the way in southeastern Montana near sunset, watching two “dueling” supercells over Carter County. There was a pronounced mammatus display, so I stopped for a few photos before calling the chase off.

Considering I almost went to Minnesota and spent most of the day in South Dakota, Montana was probably the last place I expected to get my best photos of the day.