Saturday's Chase Recap

Panoramic view of the approaching storm and its
structure.  A tornado warning was issued right after
this was taken.

The two cells we were chasing.  The white square
is where we were located and the white circle was where
somebody reported seeing a tornado a few minutes after we
saw one.

Saturday turned out to be pretty exciting. We went out to Salina, KS to start and we decided where we wanted to go from there.  We ended up heading north to Concorida, KS.  After grabbing lunch, we proceeded to head north and eventually crossed the KS/NE border.  We then turned west on route 4 and started heading towards a cell.  There was another cell to the south of it and it looked like they were going to merge so we eventually came up on the structure of the north cell and pulled off to the side.  We snapped a few pictures of the incoming storm and eventually moved south to try to get to the south side.  As we began to head south two tornado warnings were issued for both cells.  We continued to move south and I looked to the right of us and I saw some rotating dirt out in a field.  It was tough to see because the wind had kicked up a wall of dirt that was blowing across the field but as I continued to look the dirt kept rotating.  It appeared to be a very weak tornado and looking at the SPC reports, one was reported just northeast of us. We kept driving and eventually pulled off and took on some heavy rain and gusty winds.  Then we drove to the west of the cells and they began to weaken so we started heading back south again.  At this time most of the cells were out of our range or weakening. 

Mammatus clouds to the south west of the cells.