By Dave Schroeder and Adam Smith

A storm chase team from a Colorado research center and the Discovery Channel's Storm Chaser program were in central Nebraska Thursday afternoon and evening to monitor and track the severe storms. Joshua Wurman, the President of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Colorado, was among the crew members on the chase team. He says one of their vehicles was a truck with a Doppler radar mounted on it. Another was an armored vehicle with weather instruments and an IMAX camera mounted. It's designed to go through an actual tornado. Another truck was carrying instruments called "pods" that act like an automated weather station. Wurman says all of the data is gathered to measure windspeeds and patterns in strong tornadoes.