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May 23, Western Kansas

Our day started in Hays, KS where my dad and I had stayed the night before. We took our time before moving since we were rather close to the target area. The first move was to Wakeeney where we sat for about 30 minutes before deciding to reposition to Ness City, just south of there. After staying in Ness for more than an hour we jumped on the developing cumulus field along the dryline just west of there. Storms began to intensify and quickly became severe. We intercepted a storm in southern Gove Co. that was tornado warned and followed it north to I-70 where we viewed our 1st tornado of the day which would go down as an EF2.

(All pics in this report are video stills)

We tried to follow this storm but storm motions had other plans. After some time trying to figure out the next move, we ended up shooting south and waiting for storms to pretty much come to us with motions of 40-50kts to the north. In southern Gove Co., we intercepted another tornado warned storm where we watched this brief EF0 tornado touchdown.

This circulation would soon occlude and kill this tornado before the new circulation would form to the north and end up putting down the strongest tornado in this region since 1990. We drove north on Castle Rock road trying to keep up with this storm as it cycled and regained strength. A couple miles north of where we saw the previous brief tornado, a large wedge could be seen in the distance.

A small satellite tornado formed and rotated around the main wedge for a while.

We ended up pulling over for a short period of time to get some shots of this massive tornado and witnessed multiple vortices rotating within.

As we moved further north with the storm it would become more of a "stovepipe" tornado as it approached I-70 near Quinter, KS.

I t looked as though the tornado was thankfully weakening as it approached the freeway but it soon tightened up and became a tall slender tornado.

This tornado would eventually rope out north of I-70 after doing major damage in Gove Co. This tornado was on the ground for over 10 miles and received an EF-4 rating from the NWS meaning winds within the tornado were around 200mph. Our day did not however end with this storm as we regrouped and headed back east on I-70 noticing a supercell well to the south moving quickly north. We exited the freeway at Ogallah and shot south to Brownell before checking out the storm then moving back north with it along 147 towards Cedar Bluff Resevoir. I actually made a mistake here focusing on an old circulation when the new dominant one was forming right over our heads. I fact a street sign fell over into the road as we passed and then I noticed a large debris field about 100 yards back viewed from the passenger window. (First view of tornado in 1st pic was when it was closest but camera was out of focus. Got a nice shot of it a bit further up the road. )

Multiple power flashes were observed as we drove away into the core and baseball hail as we made our escape.

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