Home Photos By Year Information Winter Weather Links Contact About Aurora
5-06-07
Day 2 started off in Salina, KS obviously. We both were refreshed after a very good sleep at the Holiday Inn Express. I do miss Kansas. The people there are incredibly nice. Well, the people we ran into anyway. We met some individuals who truly were out to help us, and that is awesome. There was a moderate outlook issued to our south today so obviously we after it.
We really didn't have a target today so we booked south from Salina. As I mentioned the last entry (I think), Salina received 6 inches of rain overnight. With that kind of downpour, the places for the water to run are pretty limited. This was the view as soon as we left the hotel getting on the interstate.
We noticed many, many extremely flooded small creeks and rivers on the way down south. We also saw trees uprooted that appeared to be the damage from either a tornado or a downburst. Whatever it was, it did some damage. There was also a substation of some sort that was completely destroyed. I didn't get any pictures of this, but I did take some video. There was this cloud bank ahead of us a little further down the road that really looked cool. It looked like a big cumulus mountain. The only shot I really got was with the 300 but it really isn't too great. This was through the windshield.
Even further down the road, we started seeing even more damage. We did take a right at some point so it is very possible this damage was from the same storm. I would really like to know what exactly caused the damage. This went on for about 1/4 mile. Utility workers definitely had their work cut out for them after the weekend.
Ok, now the next segment is only going to be text, but what we were about to witness will be imprinted in our minds til the day we die. We were approaching the town of Greensburg which was completely wiped out by the first ever EF-5 (Enhanced Fujita). We knew we weren't going to be able to enter the actual town, but we were still hoping to maybe see some damage from the NNE path it took en route to Greensburg. But we almost weren't ready for what we saw. Trees twisted, mangled, uprooted, thrown around like twigs. We thought that was impressive. Then we came up on the first farm that was completely destroyed. We were nearly speechless. Nothing but foundations and pipes left. The entire time I was shooting video, but I almost felt bad for doing so. These people were left with nothing, absolutely nothing. Dead cattle were also strewn across the fields, legs straight out. There was even one in the ditch with its head completely missing. Vehicles were overturned, twisted, and banged up like a matchbox car that was hit repeatedly with a hammer. The damage we saw was simply incredible. We do have video, but it does it ZERO justice. I was in charge of shooting, but I didn't do a very good job because I wanted to witness it all with my own eyes, not through the viewfinder. I can only imagine what the actual city of Greensburg looks like, through our own eyes. It was simply remarkable. We will never see anything like that ever again. I really feel for the people that lost everything they have and worked for. Everything else that we thought was wrong in our lives seemed to vanish. I just simply can't imagine what I would do if I was in that situation.
Anyway, after witnessing that, we had periods of talking nonstop of what we just saw followed by periods of silence. We were completely awestruck. But, we ventured on further south toward the moderate outlooks. The landscape on the way down was amazing. You could literally see for miles and miles. Once we crossed the Oklahoma border, we took a road that went west. About three miles down the road, we turned on the weather radio to learn there were tornado warned storms back to our east. We did a quick u-turn and shot back east. We punched through the western edge and encountered some hail, but nothing too serious. To make a fairly long story short, we gathered data in a town called Alva and noticed a fairly isolated cell to the south of the line that was already moving toward us. We could see those starting to become too linear, but we were now heading after the tail end charlie. Once a storm becomes linear, you can pretty much say bye-bye to tornado chances. But, it does produce a very nice looking shelf cloud with a huge undercut arcing up after the intial plow with turbulant masses. We saw this scene and couldn't pass it up.
We booked further east then finally hooked south to go after the tail end storm. It almost seemed like the storms were lining up right over the top of us. We just couldn't get ahead into the warmer air.
We waited around a little bit longer as we finally reached the southern edge, but it was clearly evident that nothing was going to produce. We did see Shane Adams pulled off on the side of the road, but didn't stop to talk. We really weren't sure what he was filming, there was nothing there. We gave up after the skies just went to crap. We decided to head to the OK/TX border to find a place to crash. On the way, the sunset was pretty awesome. The disc was visible to the eye without having to squint or look away. There were also some very nice cloud to ground strikes so I decided to try and get the sunset with a bolt in it. Well, I did get one, but the problem is with it still being so light out, I had to close the aperture to f/22 which really dimmed the bolt. If you see, it is on the right, but not too bright. Oh yeah, I HATE power lines!!!!!!!!!! If I really wanted to, I could sweep them out, but I honestly just don't feel up to it.
Had to get some of the sunset too. Freaking power lines. Can't avoid them, I swear.
The lightning became more and more frequent and the whale's mouth appearance approached again, indicating yet another sort of lining out. We really weren't expecting much, but as we neared we started noticing some very heavy precipitation shafts. We were hoping it was just rain. We were wrong. It starting hailing very hard, some had to be the size of golf balls. We slowed to around 30 and put on the emergency flashers. I also got video of this. After we finally punched through the southern edge of this, I noticed some AWESOME anvil to ground strikes. It was very photogenic. We got off the interstate and pulled off down some very creepy back road. Some junk clouds kind of hindered some of the anvil crawlers, but we both still managed to pull off some pretty good shots.
This was one of my favorites since the mammatus were lit up by the flashers.
I should mention on the way down this road to set up, we saw two weird animals run across the road. This was well off the interstate and was very dark. We heard some very weird noise down the road also, like someone was beating a drum. Very, very eerie. But, it was worth it.