August 17th - Driving and storms

Hello.

We decided that we would chance our luck with a long haul westward today, for the chance of a few storms in western Kansas.

Thus, we basically drove from central Missouri to western Kansas, which took quite a bit of the day. We arrived in Oakley towards early evening, with storms starting to fire to the NW, across in far NE Colorado and adjacent SW Nebraska.

A few of these were severe warned, and they congregated into a line. A few other storms were in eastern Colorado, and these pushed an outflow boundary eastwards into western Kansas. We headed NW to Colby, and then northwards, observing the south-western end of the line of storms to our north-west. We stopped and watched these for quite a while - they didn't produce a huge amount of visible lightning, but had quite a nice structure. Meanwhile, other storms formed about 50 miles to our south, and as the sun set, these were picked out on glorious shades of reds and oranges.

As it got dark, we decided to head to Hays for the night - the drive was illuminated by frequent flashes of lightning from the two clusters of storms - these then merged somewhat and moved over Hays, just as we walked over to the IHOP for dinner.

It was a long day of driving, but worth it for the storms - it was quite odd to be back in Kansas just 3 months after our last visit - and even more so because our room in Hays is the same one we had back in early June! Mileage today was around 620 miles!

Trying out my solar filter - picked out a few sunspots - this is a cropped image.

Tail-end of a line of storms - looking NW from a point around 10 miles north of Colby, Kansas.

Storm to our south - taken north of Colby, Kansas.

Nice outflow feature - north of Colby, Kansas.

Not many CGs from this storm - so managed a bit of CC lightning.

From our hotel window in Hays, Kansas - hand-held, poorly set-up, rushed-job, but got a CG!

Helen got this on her iPhone - north of Colby, Kansas. My watermark/copyright is on simply because I tweaked it a bit in Lightroom and then when I exported it, it automatically put it on!