This snap is from the Greene Vision Group parking lot on North Ridge Road, looking east at a storm growing in Butler county, just minutes after the watch issuance.

In spite of the growth of that storm, I felt it would be a while before there was any real action right around Wichita. So we went and had a late lunch/early dinner. After meeting the girls at Cristi’s school and getting the laptop and what I needed to get some data, we took off for western Sedgwick county. The northern part of the county was already under a severe thunderstorm warning.

We sat southeast of Goddard, at 31st S & 151st west, for quite a while.

This is the rain foot as the storm started to make a right turn.

(5:37pm) We watched this scud cloud be condensed from the edge of the rain foot until it was drawn back into the storm.

(5:40pm) Here it is as it was drawn into the cloud base

(5:54pm) We decided to move south. This was taken from 151st & Selma. There was sustained rotation in the clouds nearest us, but the cloud above was not showing the same rotation.

(5:57pm) With apologies to Ken Cox at the NWS — this is what I called in as a tornado, from 151st W & K-42. Why I didn’t think gustnado until someone else said it, I’m not sure. This is as the swirl was dying down. As we’d driven south, we’d crossed the gust front about half a mile N of where I shot this. The dust in the front was being blown then, apparently by some inflow, though it was being blown from SW to NE. If you enlarge the shot, you can see the outflow approaching, right behind the dust swirl. As this spun up, the swirl arced the full height of the gust front and looked briefly to me like it connected to the cloud.

We saw several more of these as we drove along with the gust front, and in each case it was right at the intersection of the gust front and southwest wind flow. each time, we were in southeast wind flow.

We pulled up in a church parking lot next to the fire station west of Haysville. As we got stopped, a sustained whirl showed up just to our west — literally on the north boundary of the fire station property. This one was different in character than the earlier ones. It was longer-lived, but not long enough for me to get a shot of it — partly because we were hit with heavy rain almost simultaneously. But there was just a different character to this one, too. Less than a minute later, the first tornado warning was issued for Sedgwick county. I don’t know if we were seeing the same thing, but I felt it at the time.

(6:30pm) This is taken from Meridian and about 87th South, looking back toward Haysville. There’s a hint in there that could be an obscured tornado, but I’m really not sure.

(6:30pm) This one is a little better, but I’m still not sure. And I wasn’t sure when I was seeing it live. We continued south to Clearwater Road and went east to Broadway, trying to get to the southeast of the circulation. As we got to the Clearwater Road & Broadway intersection, Roxan and I both saw the cone stick down from the cloud, appearing to be about over the Turnpike about 3 or 4 miles north of us. We saw it too quickly and were turning south, so neither of us is sure whether it was visually connected to the ground at that point.

(6:44pm) We paralleled the storm on 119th South as it was being reported passing through Derby. This is taken from the west edge of Mulvane.

(6:56pm) We went through Mulvane on 119th, and stopped at Butler Road to take this.

We’d gone South on Butler Road to K-15 and were coming back to Wichita, as I wasn’t prepared for an out-of-county chase. As we passed Geuda Springs Road, we encountered the second storm. We had to stop on the side of K-15 due to field debris being blown across the road. As nearly as I can remember, we’d have been about where the marker is. The corn shucks in the air and the long grass in the ditch showed three distinct areas of circulation — wind’s I’d estimate at 60-70 mph — crossing us while we were stopped there. None was larger than about 25 feet in diameter, but each was a distinct column of circulation than moved through the air, which was otherwise full of corn shucks blowing NE to SW.

(7:22pm) This round bale and another were blown from the field at the west edge of the map above, at Oxford Rd and K-15. If you look carefully, you can see where this one crossed the vegetation at the edge of the field. The two bales were almost 90 degrees apart in their orientation from the field…the other bale was in the K-15 ditch. This one was also 90 degrees to the direction of the straight-line wind flow we’d experienced 3/4 mile away.

(7:25pm) This tree was down on the edge of the farmstead at 1256 K-15 Highway. The base of the tree is to the NE, and it’s laying to the SW. The trunk was about 2 feet in diameter. It’s about 3/4 mile NW of the hay roll.

(7:31pm) This utility pole was down just to the southeast of 1332 K-15 Highway, on the east side of the road.

(7:31pm) This tree was down right across the road from it, blown the same direction. The base is a little less than 2 feet in diameter.

We got home to find the power out, and it stayed off until 11:30pm. Haven’t done a walkaround of the house yet or gone to see the damage to our north.

That was a close call. I’m not sure yet what severe parameter didn’t quite make it, but based on the radar-indicated path of the rotation in the storm that tracked across Wichita, the fact that the tornado reported north of Viola lifted before reaching town is something we should all be thankful for. The track is very near what I would have considered a worst-case scenario for Wichita.

We were a bit behind it (north edge of Suppesville) when that tornado was reported; to us it looked like a rain-wrapped funnel. But I don’t doubt at all the two reports from 7-8 miles N of Viola. I won’t be surprised to find that the actual distance was closer to 5 miles; it is quite hard to correctly estimate distance in those situations. I would have pegged it about 2 miles NE of us, but I think I was probably estimating too close.

In and amongst everything else tomorrow, I am going to have to find time to re-configure the power distribution in the van. We lost the PC that handles GPS and streaming right in the heat of things, and after it came up were having problems with the wireless access point I use to get into it from the laptop. Aging wiring in the van, a bit too much power pull on the inverters, and a pair of aging inverters are the likely culprit. I’m hoping that replacing the inverters and running a dedicated power wire for the cell booster will fix the problem.

Game on again for Wednesday – I’m sitting out tomorrow, due to too many family commitments and the conditional nature of the risk.

After finishing work and model analysis, I decided we’d probably be looking just SE of Wichita for storms to fire, somewhere in the 4pm timeframe. So we headed to lunch – as it turned out, right on the dry line – at Olive Garden on Maize Road. The precursors to what would be the first storm of the day were already thickening overhead. After we finished lunch, I set up the little bit in the van that has to be done each day, and just as I was getting streaming going, the first warning was issued.

We had to pick up Cristi at about 3:45, so following the storms into Butler county wasn’t in the offing. However, we did sit for a time at 53rd and Oliver and stream video of the storms to our northeast. After picking up Cristi on the south side, we sat in a parking lot and waited while watching the tops of the clouds roll. The towers were still getting laid over by winds aloft, though. We eventually went to I-235 and 25th Street, and sat up on the Big Ditch end of the bridge there for half an hour or so.

Failing to note the time, we decided to take a short break at the Ridge Road/21st QT. Unbeknownst to me, KWCH had wanted to use the video from I-235 and 25th at the top of the 5pm show. We were able to get lined up on an SLC formation over north Wichita, but I don’t think that video ended up being usable. We did the QT run with the camera focused on that feature, which seemed to be trying to get organized. As we got back in the van, there was no rain, but we suddenly went to pea-size hail, which lasted for about 5 minutes.

We decided to go around 235 to south Wichita, finding in the process that the dry line was still right up against 235. The closet-to-severe conditions we experienced were while we were driving around 235. The whole trip, wind was 40mph+ from our right – so from the NW, W or S depending on where we were. The south winds (inflow) were the worst, kicking up dust at I-235 and West and making the van nearly impossible to control. I’d estimate about 50mph out of the due S at that point. Did not see any branches falling from trees yet, though.

The rest of the evening was watching things gear down, really. We shot video and I did a phone interview at 6pm, looking north from Harry and I-135. I toyed with breaking off for the storms developing to the south…and if I had, we’d have been on them when the outflow from the northern storms hit, causing the warning for eastern Butler county/Greenwood county. But such decisions are all part of the game.

105 miles, five hours, never left Wichita. Gee, it’s like I was back at KFDI

We knew going in things would be a challenge, but I think it was on both our minds that the biggest challenge was just where rising air would pierce the cap. The air really never got to rising, so that never became an issue.

We did decide at one point to make the drive to Pratt, but I think we were both realized by then our hopes were dwindling. it was really, I think, a “follow the other chasers” moment more than anything that caused us to really think anything was going to go up. Upon arrival in Pratt, we parked in the McDonald’s parking lot. Do you sense a theme for the season developing here?

Twenty minutes later, we called it a bust and settled in for the 80-minute drive home. Gotta have these days every once in a while right?