KSStorm Blog

5 bags.

Cristi is stay­ing with my brother Todd, his wife Sherra and their fam­ily in Edmond, OK while Pat, Roxan & I go to the East Coast. Pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence tells us she’d be bored silly with a lot that we plan. Her sis was when we did a sim­i­lar DC tour at this age.

We’ve been plan­ning a trip to the East Coast for my old­est daugh­ter, Pat, since shortly after the first of the year — it’s her 16th birth­day present from Mom and me.

We’ll be post­ing pic­tures and videos as we get time — it’s a pretty busy trip. Four days in DC, three in Philadel­phia, three in New York City, and to cap it off, July 4th fire­works over Nia­gara Falls — viewed from our din­ner table at the top of Sky­lon Tower on the Cana­dian side of the falls. Then we have a train ride home.

Here’s a link to the Picasa page that will host our pho­tos…

I’ll be tweet­ing and post­ing some pho­tos direct to the blog, too. Have a great two weeks — we plan to!

Taken from 70th Street and Haver­hill Road about a minute before But­ler county spot­ters reported a brief touch­down between 20th & 40th, east of Haver­hill Rd.

Saw this about 7pm this evening. We first called it a microburst, but when I was scan­ning the tape to pull the microburst video, an indis­tinct some­thing showed up in the clouds to the left of the dust on the ground. Both Matt and I believe the area, which was some­what funnel-shaped, spun for just a cou­ple of seconds.

There’s a lot point­ing toward it being noth­ing at all, but there are some things that give it at least a pos­si­bil­ity. Both ICT and the TWDR just a few miles east of where this occurred were show­ing ~60–70 knot inbound wind in this loca­tion. My radar archive jumps from 25:56Z to 00:14Z so it is of no help. The con­sen­sus so far among the NWS folks here is “can’t say for sure.” I’m going to pull a longer clip tomor­row morn­ing and email it to them so they can hope­fully match our video with the radar and come up with an answer.

The street sign you see flash through early on is 199th W and 111th South, and the dust is from a farm field about 1.5 miles west of Clear­wa­ter, approx­i­mately 151st-167th W and 103rd S, so it was about 2–2.5 miles east of us.

What­ever it is, it put a chal­leng­ing twist to the active part of a very chal­leng­ing day, fore­cast– and strategy-wise. A big thanks for Matt for the extra work he did this morn­ing on the hand analy­sis and other things that helped me get my mind wrapped around an atmos­phere I, frankly, had not paid atten­tion to for sev­eral weeks.

It’s pos­si­ble (maybe even likely) this will end the spring sea­son for me. Look­ing for­ward to our east-coast vaca­tion two weeks from today, and have to send the lap­top off to one of my news­peo­ple so she can cover for me while she’s also trav­el­ing. With it gone, most of my chas­ing tools are, too, and I’m pretty much ready to move into a few down months any­way. All in all, it’s been a decent sea­son, with more hits than misses.

EDIT: The pix­eliza­tion of the con­ver­sion to Flash really made it blocky and hard to see. If you’re inter­ested and can take a 3MB email, let me know and I’ll send you the original.