Overlooked photos, day 11 - May 23 2008

Tonight's overlooked photo comes from a day that didn't show me uploading any still photos I don't think. May 23rd 2008 was the second in a two day tornado outbreak in western Kansas. While we should have stayed glued to the warm front, we spent most of the day further south along the dryline where intense supercells would erupt, but lack the added punch to produce significant tornadoes as the storms further north (Quinter EF4).

The first storm we intercepted north of Dodge City looked like it wanted to do it for a very long time, but remained in a quasi-HP form early in its life producing a rain wrapped tornado. It was apparent a tornado was on going (minutes after this photo) but we didn't get a view until the entire mesocyclone occluded revealing a choked off mesocyclone with dancing vortices underneath only for a few seconds.

This photo shows the intense supercell moments before it produced the rain wrapped tornado to our south. I invite you to check out our "main event" as we experienced 80-100 mph winds in the RFD to another supercell later in the evening.