Justin Teague, Greg McLaughlin, Joseph Tyree, and Lisa Wadlow left Tulsa around 9:30am with an intial target of Canadian, Texas. Storms fired a little ahead of schedule, but the best storm was sitting on top of Canadian, so we weren't at all disappointed.
We intercepted the storm near Buffalo, Oklahoma and immediately noticed the ragged/outflow dominant appearance of the base. We knew that the environment was becoming increasingly supportive of supercells, so we decided to stick with the storm as it moved into Kansas.
As the storm neared Pratt, Kansas, a wall cloud rapidly took shape and the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning.
Developing "inflow tail".
Fully developed "inflow tail".
We moved North in an effort to stay with the wall cloud, practically driving underneath it at times. A weak, short-lived, tornado formed about 50 yards in front of us (video below) right as the mesocyclone occluded and the new meso took shape to the north.
After the brief tornado dissipated, we continued to the North and East, desperately trying to keep up with the storm on the Kansas county road system. At this point, the storm was moving away from the greater instability and into an area of higher Convective Inhibition. New convection was firing to our Southwest, so we had a decision to make.
Thanks to this tree branch, blocking our best option to keep up with the storm, we made the decision to intercept the storm that was traveling Northeast, towards Great Bend. At this point, we were running VERY low on gas and needed to find a gas station, but there weren't any towns of any significance along our intercept path. We decided to chance it and head for the "town" of Seward, Kansas.
Luck was on our side, Seward had a small filling station next to a couple of grain silos. With the swipe of a credit card, the 4Runner was sippin' on that good ol' dinosaur juice and we were in a prime position to intercept the approaching supercell. It wasn't long before a nice elephant trunk tornado formed near the town of Radium (video below).
Tornado near Radium, Kanasa
After the Radium tornado roped out, we intercepted yet another storm that was moving up from the South, near Macksville. Where we saw the tornado below.
At this point in the chase, we were worn out and tired of "sliding" along on the muddy county roads, so we decided to call it a day and head back to Tulsa. This ended up being one of our more grueling chases, but at the end, we felt that it was worth the trip. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those that were affected by the tornadoes of May 4th and May 5th, 2007, especially those in the town of Greensburg, Kansas.
Chase Reports 
