Wednesday - May 12, 2004 - Tornado near Attica, KS

A bit disappointing when you have the general target area correct and end up missing the main tornadoes... but, I won’t complain too much since we did end up with a worthwhile tornado and many other smaller events.

Left McCook, NE and drove south through Dodge City and ended up in Greensburg. While it is nearly impossible to get a regular cell signal in the town... we were able to get Wi-Fi data. Two areas had our interest.... one to the north along the front and the other to the south... northeast of the dryline surge. We actually started making a move toward the front when explosive development started taking place southeast of Coldwater. This first storm became our initial target. As we were trying to get into position by driving toward Pratt... another severe storm developed to our south and was moving toward Medicine Lodge. We wanted to play that storm at that time...but we kept coming across interesting things associated with our first storm that would hold our attention. The first was this funnel cloud south southwest of Pratt. This was likely a tornado when we were seeing it.... but we were too far away to confirm anything on the ground. The updraft to our west at the time had a lowered area with rotation as well.

We continued to try and move toward the Medicine Lodge storm but ended up watching areas of rotation near and east of the town of Isabel. Once again.... this was just impressive enough to hold us up and not make a full run toward Attica where I thought we could have intercepted the south storm. We finally dropped into Attica about 15 minutes after the tornado had hit the southeast side of the town. They were already putting up roadblocks on highway 160 and we were not able to follow the storm to the east. We went west of the town to avoid being hit by another very impressive storm that was headed our way. We watched a lowered area move very close to Attica and then started trying to follow it east. We were surprised to see that the roadblock had been removed. At first I thought that the people that were running the roadblock had just gone to seek shelter.... but down the road we could see where the debris from the first tornado in the area had been moved out of the way.

It was now getting well after sunset and very hard to see. About 4 miles east southeast of Attica, we saw a funnel cloud that extended about 2/3's the way to the ground and was likely a tornado. But again... too dark to confirm this. We had just about given up on the day and were getting ready to head south toward Oklahoma when one of the members of our caravan spotted a debris cloud to our south. This was the start of a few intense minutes. The first good lightning strike showed a pretty strong tornado was occurring and we were just about on the wrong side of it. We were able to see the tornado for about six minutes (909-915 p.m.) as it moved from about 7 miles east southeast of Attica to about 10 miles east of Attica. It then became obscured by rain.

We were caught in another roadblock as the storm went to the east and then we made a quick dart south through Anthony and into Oklahoma.

Here are some other views with various lighting as the storm moved away from us. ONE TWO THREE