Tornadoes Witnessed

May 29, 2004- Anthony, Ks-Conway Springs, Ks

Risk Level: High

Tornadoes witnessed: 10

Hail witnessed: .5"

Chase Account by: Mike Mezeul

May 29, 2004 has officially gone down in history as our chase teams best chase day since we have been together. We witnessed an amazing 10 tornadoes, 13 if you want to include satellites, and made a round trip mileage of over 1100 miles in 38hrs. With a chase team consisting of Scott Peake, Ken Fugate, Leandra Casper, and myself (Mike Mezeul), we were in for a fun time already, and things just got better once the actual chase part began.

Planning for our chase had begun on Thursday night of that week, 2 days in advance, which was what seemed like a first for us. We had been watching and analyzing the ETA maps, surface charts, 500mb charts, and SPC Forecasts and we knew things were going to fire the most explosively in northern Kansas. We had what looked like would be a classical triple point setup in NW Kansas and a diverging jet stream set-up just along the KS-OK border. With all that in mind we decided to shoot for Salina, KS as our target area.

On the morning of that great Saturday, May 29, our chase team piled into Ken’s van (doing this to save some money due to ridiculously high gas prices) and pulled out of Plano, TX at about 4a.m. We jumped on Interstate 35 and began our long and exhausting 6 hour trip to the Kansas-Oklahoma border. Before we got to our target area we decided to stop in Norman, OK for some breakfast at IHOP and to meet up with fellow chasers Gene & Karen Rhoden. We hung out at their place for a bit discussing possible changes in target areas and doing our rain dance in the middle of their street (just kidding bout the rain dance!). We than decided to pull out of Norman at about 9a.m. and shoot northward into Kansas. The Rhoden’s decided they would hang back around Ponca City and hope for the dryline storms to fire. Our chase team decided to head north into Kansas and station ourselves a bit south of our target area in Wichita, KS. Now on our way to our target area things were already showing a exciting day was in store for us. At the Wichita Turnpike, we were pulling up to pay our tolls, when all of sudden…WHAM!!! Rear-ended by someone distracted by our vehicle. Now with Ken’s van being the beast it is, it suffered not a single scratch, but the Ford F-150…heh heh heh…go Chevy. So moving on from our “accident”, we than decided to try and find a hotel to get Internet service at. With a little sweet-talking from yours truly, I was able to get our chase group a hotel room for free for a few hours. During this time, we noticed a few discrete cumulus towers going up about 3 counties to our west. We knew this was the dryline beginning to fire and we were up and out of the room before we could fully let the image load.

So out of the hotel we shot, and headed west on HWY 160. We could see our towers going up and crashing back down, not what we wanted to see, but at least we knew that there was a strong cap and the dryline was approaching. After about an hour’s drive we got to Anthony, KS and stopped and waited. Our storm was really trying to get going, it its updrafts occlude and dissipate numerous times, but eventually it took me cussing the storm out in a giant wheat field (evil laugh) and some deeper moisture, and BAM within minutes our storm had a mothership appearance and a horseshoe look to it. Sitting on a dirt road, we began to get into some rain and small hail so backed off East a bit and noticed a tiny area of rotation to our northwest with an RFD wrapping around it. We pulled over and began to watch the birth of our first and certainly not last tornado of the day. For over 20 minutes, we had a beautiful cone tornado on the ground. I personally, could have asked for nothing better. A beautiful F1 tornado gracefully dancing amongst the Kansas wheat fields, an amazing sight to the human eye. Eventually our first tornado began to rope out, along with the updraft above it, and before we knew it another tornado had dropped just to our due east. A large cone rapidly descended from a well-defined wall cloud, quickly touched the ground, and before we knew it we had not one, not two, but three tornadoes on the ground at the same time! Our first tornado to the west-northwest, our new stovepipe to our due east, and its satellite tornado to the northeast!! It was an amazing site!!! Unfortunately, it only lasted for a minute or two at most, and then we were just left with our stovepipe tornado (#3) to our east. This tornado was absolutely beautiful. Not only was it to our east and we could practically walk up to it, but also it was spinning off satellite tornadoes relentlessly! We were able to stick with this tornado for about 15 minutes before it took off northeastward and due to lack of roads (actually Kansas has a great road system, most were blocked from downed power lines, and believe or not, even some cows) we had to drop south and eventually work our way back northward again. All this time though we were able to see a new fresh tornado brewing to our north again, this was a monster dusty wedge tornado. Sadly, we were unable to get any good shots of it as it moved opposite our direction. About 15 minutes later though we caught up to a new tornado, a very large rain-wrapped cone tornado. We make a quick pass through the small town of Argonia, where tornado sirens were roaring throughout the town, and eventually hopped on the “every chaser” highway. This highway (cant remember the name) was packed with every sort of chaser! From news teams to amateurs to emergency spotters, it was crazy. Although this highway provided one of the best views for our last two tornadoes, a bright orange sunset backlighting to a dark beastly tornado in the foreground, the traffic made it hard to

concentrate on the storm, instead we were watching for other chasers not to hit. Our final two tornadoes spawned from an insanely strong rotating wall cloud, they dropped very rapidly and were both ranked F3’s. With daylight coming down to a minimum, we hopped on our last highway to capture the view of a monster wedge that hit the town of Conway Springs. This tornado was measured at ½ mile wide by the NWS and was on the ground for about 15 minutes total before lifting just southwest of Wichita, KS. Not only was it a great wedge tornado, but it also spawned a nice needle satellite tornado for a few minutes, making for a very memorable grand finale.

All in all, May 29, 2004, will be the best chase of my career…going on 5 years this spring! Not only does it etch a handful of beautiful images into my mind, those ranging from a ½ mile wide wedge to three simultaneous tornadoes to an impressive barber poll structure, but also it will forever etch the feeling of being alone with a storm and being able to really observe and appreciate Mother Natures true power. Also, one final lesson I personally learned on this trip was to keep the windows closed whenever chasing in Kansas. I accidentally had opened the back two windows of Ken’s van a tad, and we chased over 3 hrs on dirt roads with them open, lets just say the result was a very dirty van, about 1 inch of red dirt coating EVERYTHING!