Last Day

Today started out with hope for a good chase day, but the early morning storms cleaned out the atmosphere. We waited for a bit and got a group picture. No storms...so we headed back down to Norman, OK. Tomorrow, Dad and I drive back home. What a trip this has been! I have had so much fun. I want to thank Charles, John, George, and Mike for getting us to some fantastically awesome storms!! Thanks to everyone for making this trip fun too!!

Bust....

Today was a marginal day. The cap was too strong and no storms worth chasing developed. We drove from Hays, KS to Independence, KS. Tomorrow looks like it may be a chase day on the drive back to Norman.

May 29....does it again

May 29, 2004 was a fantastic day for Tour 2......May 29, 2008 was great!!!!! We targeted a storm near Kearney, NE. Mike Theiss said he saw a power flash. We pulled over and watched. John said there was a wedge in there, he could see the right edge. With that we broke the record for most tornado chases in one tour. That record was set in 2004 by non- other than tour 2!! Soon the storm began to gust out, so we turned and went south into Kansas. We targeted the "Tail-end Charlie" storm. We drove through Glen Elder, KS to get a better look at the storm. We watched a tornado as it would go up and reform. We drove back though Glen Elder as it became too dark to see. We saw damage and realized the tornado went through the town of Glen Elder. The town had tree and powerline damage. We had to turn around beacuse of power lines across the road. Today all in all was a great day, with the exception of the town getting hit.

Drive Day

Today was a drive day to get in place for tomorrow. We started the day in Norman, OK and drove about 500 miles to Norfolk, NE.

May 27 Bust

We drove from Wichita, KS to Elmer, OK. We saw some nice storm structure and blue- green hailcore. The storm became out flow dominant and soon died. We drove to Lawton, OK and most of our vehicle ate at Branding Iron BBQ, which had really good food, which caused me to overeat. Tomorrow looks like a drive day back to Nebraska.

Picture Update

This is a picture of a tornado we saw near the town of Pratt, KS on May 26.

Tied Record....

We had another great day on May 26. We saw more tornadoes (we lost count of how many we have seen on this trip)! Mike, the driver of one of the vans (not the one I was in) got stuck in the mud and we had to wait out the hail before we (the vehicle I was in) could pull him out of the mud. We then drove towards a town to find shelter from the hail. We found a building with an overhang that was large enough for all three vehicles to fit under. We listened as the hail pounded the metal roof. What a sound!! We nicknamed this event "The Collision at Collison". After the hail, we continued down the road towards Wichita, KS where we saw some great storm structure and a least one tornado.
We hve now tied the record for Coud 9 Tours of 4 chase days leading to tornadoes. The record was set in in 2004 by Tour 2 (I was on that tour as well). We still have Tuesday - Saturday and we just need one more tornado chase to break it. Stay tuned to see if the record gets broken......