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!!