After countless storms and close calls we finally got our first tornado. It was a nice cone that was on the ground for a long period of time just outside of the town of  Rozel, Kansas. We have not heard if there were any injuries reported as of yet but we hope that there weren’t any.

The day was a coin toss as we were essentially in position from about noon as we watched the front roll in from the Smoke Hoss Restaurant where we enjoyed another delicious meal (having stopped there almost exactly 1 week prior on a different trip through the same town of Meade, KS). There was a cell that was quite strong that popped up to our north and another one that was to our south across the Oklahoma border. The models had predicted that cells would pop up right at our location where the potential for tornadoes was the highest in the area.

The issue was that these storms were not predicted to start until after 6PM and we were waiting for a few hours watching these storms to our north and south that had attracted the attention of many of the other chasers that were out. However, we sat and waited sticking to the original plan and putting some faith that our storm would not only appear, but it would be the best of the day.

At about 6:20PM everything started happening and we were off to chase. The storm appeared right were it should have and moved into the energy that we were hoping it would. We watched it grow on the radar and the top of the cloud peaked over 50,000ft at one point. When we reached the sideroad that many other chasers had set up on we watched it produce a tornado that stayed on the ground for over 5min.

We will put up a video of this tornado and the other 3 that this storm produced as we followed its path north-east when time allows for editing, but right now we have to hit the sack as there are predictions for even stronger storms tomorrow around our area again.