I set out after work around 5pm, and arrived at Scott's house in Queens around 6:30. We packed my stuff in the truck, met up with Pete, and headed west into the night on I-70. 1200 miles and 25 hours later, we set up for the night in Lebanon, Missouri.

Along the way, Mark had some problems with fluid leaking out of his rear differential, and I finally got to see the St. Louis Gateway Arch in the daylight!

We drove from Blackwell OK up through southern KS. Along the way we stopped at the exact location that we filmed the Attica video from in 2004. It looked a little different than it did then! The good news is that the house has been completely rebuilt. But the trees are still pretty mangled.

We tried chasing storms near Colorado today, but they just died when we got to them. Spending the night in Colby KS, where we met up with Chris Kridler.

Looked kind of interesting today, but moisture was a big problem. We did manage to see one tornado northeast of Kearney NE, but it was pretty far away and in low contrast.

Click the picture for more details and pictures...

Today looked pretty maginal to start with. Southerly flow above atop southerly flow at the surface spelled squall line. Storms went up around 3pm and lined out fairly quickly. But at least they were nice to look at.

Ahead of a huge shelf cloud, we did see a nice laminar shear funnel. We let the shelf overtake us with incredible turbulence behind it.

And no, Scott's not commenting on the quality of the storms...That's a huge compost pile right behind him! EEEEWW!

We went on our annual pilgrimege to the Great Ball of Twine in Cawker City KS. The "curator of the twine" saw us milling around taking pictures, so she came out and let us officially add to the ball! The world's largest ball of twine is now 1,360 feet longer and 3.5 pounds heavier! It was awesome! :-)

Started off in Kearney NE where we hung out at our hotel with wifi. We were joined by Charles Edwards and Cloud9 Tours. Jetted off to Grand Island around 4pm, and met a whole bunch more chasers at the Bosselman's there.

Storm initiation exploded around 6:30. We got right up underneath the base, which was showing a nice circular banded shape already. A couple more cells developed to its southwest. The storm tried very hard to produce a tornado, but rather quickly transitioned to HP, making things difficult to see. We pulled northeast of it and were treated to a beautiful stacked plates appearance into the evening hours.

Caught the monster supercell NE of Plainview TX. It produced a spectacular white tornado, which turned into a huge dusty stovepipe. It moved too fast and cut off our only south escape route with a row of downed power poles across the road. Nothing to do but sit by the poles and get SLAMMED by hail approaching the size of grapefruits.

The hail guards did their job protecting the glass (although we did lose one side window). However, all of the guards were themselves destroyed. The dents in the windshield hail guard show the size of the hail that hit it.