Hello from Russell, Kansas!

What a last 24 hours it has been... George Kourounis joined us Wednesday evening (driving from Sudbury to our place) and from there we left at about 10:00pm for Tornado Alley! We drove as far as we could making it to Defiance, OH before calling in a night. We got a few hours of sleep then hit the road again early this morning. We made it all the way to Russell, KS but not before meeting up with Scott McPartland, Dave Lewison, and Cecelia Morgan along the I-70 west of Kansas City. That puts us at about 1,930 km (1,200 mi) in 24 hours.

We're spending the night here in Russell because 1) that's as far as our bodies could take us and 2) it puts multiple targets in play for tomorrow which is proving to be quite the difficult forecast.

Storm Prediction Center's outlined risk areas for day 2 (Friday, May 17).

There are quite a bit of favourable dynamics around the western Kansas area forecast for tomorrow but models seem to be struggling to break out consistent convection. A lot of parameters are screaming "head north into Nebraska" but the fear is that storms there may quickly become messy so visibility will be an issue and tornado-threat would rapidly decrease. It's a pretty hard forecast at this point and we're looking over newer model runs now to try and make a decision. The good news in we're in fairly good position to go either way.

Tomorrow we're hopefully meeting up with the rest of the crew who is out here!