I’m really tired from all the driving (due to a short night for sleep… about 5 hours altogether), so here’s the bullet list version of our day:
- We met around 10 a.m., generally considered ‘sleeping in’ for a chase day.
- We chose the central Kansas moderate risk area as our target, leaving Iowa behind. (Ironically, there was a large tornado near Waterloo, IA, only 1.5 hours from Coralville, where we started the day. C’est la vie!)
- We struggled with getting a dedicated circuit for Scott’s inverter (thus for his laptop), making repeated adjustments to the power arrangement as we charged down I-80, I-35, I-70, and various connecting roads. Nothing but a dedicated cigarette outlet seems to work out! I’m really frustrated we haven’t found a smaller inverter, an iGo adapter for the D600, or any better soluton for powering the laptop than we have.
- The sun finally came out around Des Moines (exactly as Scott called it!)
- About 2/3 of the way through our 600+ mile drive, we met up with the storms.
- We saw penny-, dime-, and nickel-sized hail around Ellsworth, KS
- We got a good lightning show
- We got huge amounts of rain
- Once the storms moved on, we got a weird ‘mixed sky’ sunset: a partial red ball of a sun, dark purple to the north and east, isolated streaks of blue sky to the west, and broken, washed-out looking clouds to the south. If I were chasing solo, I’d have stopped to take a picture of this schzophrenic sky.
We ended up in the southern moderate risk area (like many folks hoping for a better tomorrow), but missed what little happened here, due to our late arrival. The big picture of storm activity looked like this:
| START TIME | START ODOM. | START LOC. |
|---|---|---|
| 5/25/2008 10:38 | 5192 | Days Inn, Coralville, IA |
| FINISH TIME | FINISH ODOM. | FINISH LOC. |
| 5/25/2008 22:20 | 5849 est. | Super 8 Motel, Hays, KS |
| ELAP. TIME | MILES TTL. | REMARKS |
| 11:42 | 657 | Positioning day |