Traveling Home

On the road this morning out of Wichita, KS in-route to the soggy state of Iowa. I'm sure it has been covered extensively by all of the local and national media, so I don't feel the need to go through all of the areas that have been getting hit hard or all the details on who/where is evacuated. Several roads are closed throughout the state, thus the route on my way home is even effected between Ames and Terril. It may be a while before we can see the rivers truly drop to levels that aren't threatening to flood with every rainfall, even with some breaks in the storm systems.

The last two days of chasing have been frustrating to say the least with storm development being along a cold front, creating a line of storms. Wednesday storms were both linear or embedded within a line, not to mention movement to the northeast over 40 mph. We did manage one tornado out of this storm, essentially coming up on it as it formed just to our east. Otherwise some scary scud and outflow shelf formations on the storms, along with some amazing cloud-to-ground lightning.
Thursday was slightly better, even though we managed to miss the tornadoes in southern Kansas. The structure with the storms was amazing, with a great wall cloud and lightning with the first storm. Managed to capture 3 lightning strikes handheld during the day/evening; with additional strikes at night. Quite a few great panoramic images should come out of the storms yesterday, as the structure once they went outflow was impressive. One picture that I do hope turned out was an image of the striated storm just to the east of Wichita late last night. It was the best nighttime storm that I have ever personally seen, with constant thunder and lightning strikes. The storms were impressive nonetheless, it just seemed as if the storms struggled to produce beings they were in such a line fashion along the front.

On the next ~6 hours on the road I have I will likely begin to get pictures edited, see what I can manage for panoramics, and lightning. It looks like any chasing has came to an end for a while with ridging likely across the plains. Even with the ridging, it still looks like thunderstorms may be possible, however, nothing significant appears likely.