For Tour #5 and Photo Tour #2, June 1st took us to the Black Hills area of South Dakota. Good upslope flow coupled with high CAPE values, would produce a very nice supercell storm that anchored itself to the east side of the Black Hills. This storm spun nicely, even tried to produce a tornado, but didn’t quite have enough low level shear to become tornadic. It did,, however, produce tons of very large and damaging hail to baseball size south of Sturgis. The storm persisted for several hours before decreasing in intensity just before dark. Both tours had a very nice treat on this day, and along with great structure, the storm produced some incredible lightning!

2015, hail, June, June 2015, lightning, South Dakota, spring, storm, supercell, thunderstorm, wall cloud