Storms 05292018

It's been slow

May 1st opened up with the latest tornado season in a long time. Late may is already threatening summer weather patterns. SO the last few weeks while closing down the classroom season, I've been chasing when I can. Sometimes it's just pretty clouds.


This next set was a small front driven squall line that was going back and forth on being severe.  The tops of the storms were illuminated in moonlight:

Storms 050118 May Day

This has been an interesting year.  Although Spring supposedly started in March, think someone ignored the calendar.  We have been in a long drought, broken up by an occasional cloud dropping less than a tenth of an inch of precipitation.  We even had a brief snow as late as April 14th.

Our first hope came April 21st where we had a little over an inch of rain.  

Rain would set out on the 7-10 day forecast at least 6 days out, then would disappear as it came closer.  Then May 1st came into view.  A slight risk slowly evolved.  A tornado threat also appeared.

Before May 1st  Kansas and Oklahoma had not had any tornadoes in 2018.  The storm of May 1st stopped all that.

I watched the storms blow up the I70 highway.As they approached the I35 exchange I decided to run up north to see the storms.  

 I passed Kanopolis lake and started seeing the storms and the gray haze from the storms.  I headed out through Brookville then turned out toward Glendale and Tescott.  This is the area SSW of Salina.

 This I believe is when the storm was hitting Tescott,

 Then this may have been near Culver.

 The storm took some time after the tornadoes to build.

 As the sun set, I noticed some clouds out to the west.  These appeared very low to the ground, but losing available light, I was done chasing.

I watched the ground scrubbers off in the distance in the failing light.  They were down mudsoaked roads and out of touch.  I started to head back to I35 but a wreck and several power poles diverted me to other wet dirt and clay roads for a fun run back to the highway and a long drive home.  The storms provided quite the light show as I drove off with almost constant lightning.  I wished I could have pulled over and watched for a while, but I had an early morning the next day and would get home late enough.