14 June 2017
Today, there were two prospects for storms in Kansas and Colorado. Bill elected to chase the Kansas storm for a couple of reasons. The Kansas storm looked like a better target and the prospect of more severe weather in Kansas the following day meant it was better to stay in the area.
They also gave everyone their Tempest Tours t-shirt at the morning briefing. One woman had her own tornado t-shirt.
We made a Walmart stop, and by 11:30, we were heading south into Kansas. We stopped at Wamego for lunch, and I headed into Taco Johns (which I like better than Taco Bell). I ordered two burritos thinking they would be like burritos I get at home.
Nope.
They were huge. They were lunch, snack and dinner.
We continued south through Admire, Kansas, and they started to get interested in potential storms in the Emporia area. I was in the back seat and was getting interested in the photo settings on my new cell phone, the Galaxy S8.
It has manual settings, RAW, panorama and more, including voice commands. I could say Cheese, Shoot, Smile and Capture to trigger the shutter.
So, a tourmate tried the same with her phone. She’d hold her phone up and say “cheese.”
And my phone would click.
LOL
So, while she fiddled with her phone, I had to exit camera mode after deleting a nice collection of photos of my knees.
She also had an app on her phone that the others also used called Radarscope. It showed the radar view but also had red dots everywhere. They were the other storm chasers.
And when there are a lot of red dots in the same area, you know you’re in a good spot.
Later in the afternoon, we went beyond the Emporia area and headed towards Wichita via Augusta. We made a stop to get some pics of the clouds developing behind a communications tower not long before sunset.
And made another stop just down the road for another look at the developing storm.
It started to rain, so we moved on. From the back seat, I heard something about wanting to get across a river. We ended up in the Mulvane area at sunset where there wasn’t much lightning, but there was a pretty sunset.
I looked straight up and could see the storm clouds growing right before my eyes. This is a three minute video condensed down into ten seconds. Note the billowing clouds above the darker ones in the foreground.
Absolutely amazing.
There was some mild rotation in the system but nothing developed, so we moved on. A few miles down the road, I looked out the left side of the van and could see the most amazing formation appear from behind a cloud.
We stopped and walked into a harvested field to watch the system develop.
As the sun set, we watched one cloud billow up with lightning. (This is at 4x speed.)
The lightning started to pick up in another cloud.
For about an hour, we watched cloud-to-cloud lightning streak under that cloud. It was dry and didn’t make a sound. No thunder. No crackling. Nothing. It was eerie.
I held up my point and shoot for some video while I played with the camera on the tripod.
The video doesn’t come close to doing it justice. I’d never seen anything like it.
The best part was that our German tourmate was with me in the field and helped me narrow down the settings to take longer exposures. That helped me get these shots.
The cloud slowly moved in our direction but not a single bolt touched the ground. I kept the tree in most of my shots hoping to catch it lighting up, but it wasn’t touched.
We finished up at eleven and headed into Wichita while the storm kept lighting up the sky all the way to the hotel – the Best Western Wichita Airport.
I got to my room and downloaded my photos while I had a shower. I finally turned in at one and thankfully didn’t have to show up until 10:15 am.
Granted, I’ll expected to be awake by six.
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