A Winner and A Tornado Watch

A winner is fun... a tornado watch, not so much!

Randomizer.org picked the number 7 and that equates to Labbie1.... email me your address and I'll get your gift card in the mail pronto!!

Thanks to all who entered and good luck in March's Country Giveaway, which will be posted in a few days.

In the meantime, we're ushering in the early spring season with our first tornado watch until 11 pm tonight.

Hubby and I are more prepared this year to watch the sky for signs of turbulent weather.  Last night we attended a National Weather Service storm spotter presentation.  We've been wanting to do this for a few years.  It was an excellent presentation by Chance Hayes, who works out of the Wichita NWS office.  Here's a link to the Wichita Eagle, which published an article a few weeks ago with more information.

We brought home a handout from the presentation with all kinds of great web links.  One of the best ones (my humble opinion) is for an Online Spotter Training Course.  This takes about 2 hours, but both myself and the hubby plan to take this course.  We really enjoyed last night's presentation and agreed that we both learned quite a bit.  Now we want to take our learning to the next level and become trained weather spotters so that we can call the NWS with reliable severe weather information in our area, especially since we live in a rural area.

What about you?  Does severe weather fascinate you - do you head for your front porch with your camera (like I do!) or do you run for the basement?!  I'll be honest... I head for the closet, eventually.  But it's usually at the last minute.

I know.  Not very smart, but I can't help it.  The photographer in me wants to get a few cool shots first!

Weather Update, 9:40 pm CST:  We are safe.  A severe thunderstorm passed through here earlier, but the worst of the storm is now to our east.  I hope that it does not cause too much damage in southeast KS and northeast OK.


(Stay safe, Pioneer Woman... the storm line is close to Pawhuska!)

My Weds morn memory revival - Pioneer Woman and family are in Colorado skiing, so they are safe.  Duh.

Thank You, Every One of You...

for your comments and concern.  We made it unscathed through today's scary storms and I'm very, very thankful for that. 

Sure, I'll admit it's fun to try and get spectacular storm photos, but today was one of those days I was really praying that the weatherman would be wrong, or at least a bit off on his calculations.

I hope that those who live east of us make it through safe and sound tonight also.  We can all get through bad storms... monster tornadoes not so much.

In the Tornado Zone

Remember this photo from last year?

That's the un-retouched version.  

Here's the version with the contrast adjusted...

so you can see the tornado.

The above tornado was on the KS/OK border on June 7, 2010,

a Monday evening, while we watched from our front porch.

Not a very scary tornado as tornadoes go, 

but it was adrenalin-producing for us.

There were tornadoes all over our area on that day last year.

Today, we are in a "high probability of a tornado" zone.  

 Dr Greg Forbes of The Weather Channel puts us at 8

for high tornado risk, out of a scale of 0-8.

Last year I wasn't working and hubby had just gotten home from work.  This year, we are both working 2nd shift.  Storm activity is supposed to fire up around 2:00 (CT) this afternoon, about the time we are headed to work.

I'm praying that our house is still standing when we get home tonight, that our dogs and horses will be ok tonight, and that the towns around us are safe and sound.

The bulls-eye area is a pretty small and condensed area, from Oklahoma City to Wichita, and we are smack-dab in between those two cities.

Keep us in your thoughts, and let's hope we don't have any repeat monster tornadoes today, like the rest of the U.S. is having.

Tornado!

Update: I've been informed this was a land spout. Hey, it was still pretty scary!

What an incredible weather day we had yesterday!  I'll let the photos tell the story... but just a little background first.  

We live in Kansas one mile east of Interstate 35 and one mile north of the Oklahoma state line.  The overturned semi trucks on I-35 that you may have seen on the news?  That was within 5 miles of our home!  The hail in the photo below?  Tennis ball size when it came down.... we were standing on our covered front porch looking at the southwest weather coming toward us,  when all of a sudden from our north side came a flying ball of hail which scared the crap outta both of us!!!  So all the weather was coming from the southwest, while the large hail came from the north.  It was amazing!  We drove around after the storm passed by so we could assess any local damage, and also try to find the path of the tornado.

Click on any photo to enlarge!

This photo (above) is straight out of my camera, so the tornado, which is only one mile to our south, is hard to see against the light colored sky.

Here's the adjusted tornado photo, with the contrast pumped up and additional post-processing effects.  My son said it looks like a "Wizard of Oz" tornado.

The storm after it passed over us (above); it's now heading to the northeast, towards Arkansas City.

I tried to gather up what was left of some of the hail, but it had already melted quite a bit.

Here's part of the tornado path... it uprooted some of these hedgerow trees and tore down some barbed wire fence;  below is a close-up of the earth that was flung and wedged between the fenceposts.

Photos of the overturned semi trucks on Interstate 35, just miles from us, on our local TV station.

As far as what it felt like, it was scary and exciting all at the same time.  Right before the storm really hit us, the thunder was a continuous rolling sound, like a growl that never stopped.  I've only heard that kind of thunder once or twice before since I moved here.  It's a very eerie sound.  As the tornado passed to our south and the hail bounced in from the north, it was only a few seconds later that the storm really hit us.  The rain came down so ferociously that we had to run inside the house. Within just seconds, we couldn't even see out the windows.  I remarked that if a tornado was forming outside, we wouldn't even be able to see it.  Of course our satellite TV was already out of commission.  For the sake of being safe rather than sorry, I threw the dogs into our bedroom closet (poor Trixie!!) and then I jumped in with them for a few minutes.  Tom of course said he would continue to monitor the skies for a tornado, even though he couldn't see anything outside!

The weather today is predicted to be mild and sunny, but later tonight we will have more storms!! You just know I will always have my camera handy, and my goal going forward is to try to not be as EXCITABLE, to calm down, and get even more and better photos.

I uploaded several of my photos to KAKE.com very late last night, and was surprised to see several of them on the morning news.

Our next purchase is definitely going to be a video camera.  I would have loved to get some video of that hail coming down and flying all around us!  

It was one crazy day!!