May 28th had that “look” to it. All the ingredients were there for a few strong supercells and tornadoes. One issue had to be solved, and that was the cap. It took a lot of convergence on the triple point just north of Salina, but finally it broke late afternoon. A cluster of storms formed, and the Bennington tornadic supercell emerged and crushed everything around it. A violent EF4 tornado formed and was nearly anchored for almost an hour before dissipating.  We were positioned about 3-4 miles east of the tornado, and assumed it would move east towards us, but instead stayed anchored nearly its entire lifecycle. Nonetheless we were treated with a vicious tornado that fortunately missed Bennington and other towns. I shutter to think what could have happened had it hit Salina or the small towns just north of there.

May 19th held high hopes for a significant severe weather outbreak. We felt south central Kansas would be the place to start. After positioning ourselves near the Kansas/Oklahoma border, several supercells formed, of few which produced tornadoes. Unfortunately for us, the storm of the day developed near Shawnee, Oklahoma and produced a large EF4 tornado.  The photos below were taken all not far from South Haven, Kansas. We witnessed 3 tornadoes this day. This first two photos are of the initial supercell and developing tornado, and the bottom two photos were of the last supercell and pretty elephant trunk tornado.

May 18th took Caryn and I to south central Kansas. We staged in Greensburg with the dryline immediately to our west. Hot temps and fairly low dewpoints had me initially concerned that storms would be high based and outflow dominant quickly. However, good shear and strong flow aloft I hoped would push storms quickly into better moisture and allow the bases to come down.  We targeted storms coming out of the Oklahoma panhandle and soon found out those would not develop into much more than a line of high based hailers. Another storm, just northwest of Greensburg, started spinning from its initiation and we decided to blast back north to catch it as it ingested mid 60s dews. Fortunately we caught the tail end of the Rozell tornado and the entire life of the Sanford tornado.  The first photo is of the Rozell EF4 tornado and the rest are from the Sanford tornado.

May 25th had tremendous potential. A warm front lay across central Kansas with a dryline intersecting it southwest of LaCrosse. By late afternoon, a supercell formed and moved along the warm front. It quickly became severe and tornado warned. Although reports of a tornado came in, we were directly under the circulation and only experienced RFD and TONS of dirt being kicked up. The storm moved northeast and became very high based and eventually died. By this time, we saw the tail end storm rapidly intensify and nearly anchor, so we blasted back southwest and arrived as the tail end supercell became intensely tornadic.

The structure was top notch with numerous inflow feeder bands wrapping around the north side of the updraft and a block shaped wall cloud with insane rising motion on the northeast side. I figured it was only a matter time before this storm produced and that was certainly an understatement. Just before dark and tapered cone tornado formed between LaCrosse and Hargrave and moved slowly east/northeast over the next 54 minutes! Frequent lightning constantly illuminated the tornado and allowed for some pretty decent photography. The tornado roped out northeast of LaCrosse where another tornado formed from the new mesocyclone. At one time there were actually 3 tornadoes on the ground, with the 3rd to our south actually going through LaCrosse. Fortunately no serious injuries or fatalities occurred from this tornadic supercell.