May 5th Revisited

Darin and I went to a small chaser party the other weekend, and I tried to round up some video to show at the last minute, and ended up chopping up May 4th, 5th and 22nd. We missed out on Rick Schmidt and Doug Nelson's Greensburg tornado footage, but we saw the stills. Absolutely incredible stuff they had. We also missed Scott Currens' Protection Video which I've been dying to see in HD, but we got to see probably, hands-down, the best tornado footage I've ever seen. Jon Davies had some incredible footage from June 9th 2005, near Hill City. I'll leave it at that. It was good seeing everyone again, and meeting a couple of new people who I had not met but did know via the internet, and we all stayed to watch the KU game after the videos were shown.

Anyways, here is May 5th, from the beginning to near end (no footage of the nighttime Seward wedge that the TIV supposedly drove through). We ran out of tape on the merry-go-round tornado, thanks to 4 tapes being used between the two days. Derek didn't do that bad of a job, on May 4th or 5th, considering he never had picked up a camera in his life!

It's hard to see on the first Pratt storm video (not time lapse), but you hear Derek talk about a spinup, and me calling it RFD, well seconds later, it was clear it was under the cloud base, and clearly rotating. I noticed on some chaser's report logs, that they said they missed it due to whatever, well we were up close and personal!


I've posted this timelapse before....

*Disclaimer* This video is
rated *CFDG* and is not suitable for those not accustomed to "yahoo" like behavior. lol



Then slowed down......with two weak spinups and a gorgeous white funnel that never touched to our knowledge.



Then the beginning of the first "Radium" cone/stovepipe.


Then end of Radium and Macksville beginning. For some unknown reason, I noticed that I loop the same footage twice, sorry about that!



And then the ending of Macksville


I think Derek and Darin slept for an hour from about 9- 10 a.m. (after we all stayed up all night assisting victims in Greensburg) the night before. Meanwhile, I couldn't sleep, and had to help navigate a friend from Lawrence to our hotel, and shortly after the long day had begun.

If both days could have had just 1 more hour of daylight, it would have been a blast, but fast storm motions on tornadic storms and dark do not mix well.


I'll probably take these down in a week, so enjoy!