After a chase that would typically leave me more then elated, while still pleased I am left with somewhat of a sour taste. It was disheartening that such a strong and historic tornado had to cause so much destruction in the community of Greensburg. We viewed some spectacular storms, however we were unable to track the Greensburg storm. On Friday we initially targeted Great Bend KS, after stopping briefly there we decided that we would just drop south and wait for some action. Once we reached Saint Johns we found a desolate country road, pulled out the lawn chairs and relaxed for a couple hours. While sitting on that road we became somewhat concerned about pre-dusk initiation as a CU field even ceased to exist. After tossing the baseball chatting with a few locals we decided if we wanted some daytime storms it was in our best interest to drop South. We dropped down to the Woodward area where we intercepted a real nice barber poll Supercell. After tracking it for a while it began to weaken just as the Greensburg storm was developing to our North, since dark was upon us we opted to not chase after it and decided we would just get some rest for the next day. Little did we know that the storm albeit at night would go on to put down a tornado of historic proportions, it's a strange feeling knowing that the area where we sat on the country road was so significantly impacted only hours after we enjoyed its quite peaceful skies.

This is just as we were rolling up on the storms updraft base

Very photogenic storm spinning like a top

Nice vault region, tennis ball sized hail was falling just to the right of the image

Nice crispy growing updraft

Note how far the updraft is being sheared from the base

From this point on, Just as the sun was setting the storm began to slowly spin itslef to death

Radar view of storm after it had moved through Greensburg and was tracking to Macksville and Saint John note the little red dot just to the North-East of Saint John, while we were setting there earlier in the day I marked our loaction which was represented by that dot.

May 5th

While most of the roads in the Greensburg area were shutdown we had to travel throug the area on Saturday the 5th to position, we did not have time to stop and record damge so I had to just grab a couple pics on the go.

Every single system for miles and miles was overturned note the next round of storms firing in the background

powerlines and sheet metal scattered about

A shelter belt was certinly no shelter for a violent tornado

VIDEO CAN BE FOUND HERE WARNING::LARGE FILE