Hopefully over the next few days to week I will get a series of frame grabs up, as well as a video clip or two (or three). I also have the entire live coverage we did with the station if anyone is interested in that, I might encode that down in wmv for everyone to watch as that played out live.
Tremendous event! I feel priviledged to not only witness an event, but to get to see TWO strong tornadoes literally within minutes and miles of one another. We were quite excited and then kinda got sick as we realized that this was most certainly going to plow right into Ralls. The second one LITERALLY missed the town by a matter of YARDS!
Here are a couple of stories the station has run:
http://kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=3346165
http://kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=3343386
http://kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=3342349
http://kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=3342388
http://kcbd.com/Global/story.asp?S=3352847
(she got a couple things crossed I told her in that one
like I told her about spotter classes, not chaser classes. heh guess I didn't make myself clear. They also didn't get Graham in it because he is off on rock camp, but he was VERY much a part of the chase that day/night and I couldn't have done all we did without him! Philip Flory as well!)
Living out in the area all my live and this is absolutely the BEST storm I have ever chased out here. Would have given ANYTHING to have it happen in the daylight as I am certain the tornados would have visually rivaled Mulvane.
I am going later this week to show the video to the NWS guys. I know we had one brief tornado at the beginning that would have been somewhere to the S or Idalou (which is west of Ralls). Then the wall cloud got absolutely huge and rotated VIOLENTLY and produced multiple spinups for a while and eventually a well formed LARGE tornado, which would have been the one that went on to hit the house and high tension power lines that got the F3 rating.
At the same time this one was going on, another one developed to the east of that one and had various shapes and sizes during it's live. When we were east of it and just a mile south of Ralls, a smaller satellite tornado formed to the SE of the second tornado making a total of 3 on the ground at the same time. We never saw this one hit anything, but it began to rotate around the east side of the secondary main tornado towards us. Keep in mind the original tornado was still on the ground.
So we had to retreat back south again about a mile or so to make sure the satelllite wouldn't hit us and it rotated all the way around to the west side of the second tornado before it appears it was absorbed into the main tornado.
At this point we weren't sure the first one was still on the ground as it appeared to either have dissipated or wrapped in rain. That is until, while still watching #2 we saw the original still there via the BRILLIANT orange, blue and green power flashes which I am certain is when it took down the high tension power lines.
That was the last we saw of the first one but the second continued on until we lost site of it somewhere NW of Ralls where I believe it dissipated. We went into town and to the north side of town where we either got blasted by RFD or the extreme outer winds of what was left of the tornado circulation where we backed off south a bit again and stayed for quite some time.
I have a feeling this will be my highlight storm of the year.
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