2012-05-24: REPORTS: KS

[Laura Duchesne]

I spent the afternoon keeping tabs on a boundary west of the KC area and noticed storms going up in MO. I knew that storms would eventually be popping up down the line into KS but I didn't think they would be firing until the boundary slipped to the east. So we went for some wings and when we stepped back outside, a large storm to our north caught our eye. We rushed back to Fred's place to check out the storms on radar. There was no way we would be catching the storm north of KC, but another storm was firing west of Ottawa, KS. We caught up with the storm eventually and saw beautiful structure and lightning. All in all, not a bad evening backyard chase!

 

[J Allen]

Targetted the trailing edge of the cold front on this day as couldn't see the point of going into the jungles of Wisconsin for fast moving and potentially dangerous storms. Ended up being a good choice when it flopped up there, got on to the tail-end storm east of Emporia and was rewarded with some really nice structure, an awesome sunset and some CGs to die for. Not bad for an out of the box day. Later on in the evening nearly managed to get myself struck by lightning, felt the prickles go up and hit the deck with a CG crashing down sub 30m behind me, was close enough that I had the arc leaders in my camera shot facing the opposite direction. Full blog writeup with pics is available here:
http://www.huntersofthunder.com/2012/05/may-24th-chasing-kansas-tail.html