16-19 May 2005

Our trek to Kansas turned out to be a trek to Nebraska.  It was a call made 
from a forecasting session the night before, which only enhances our 
admiration of our forecasters.  Last thing "the boys" said before they 
dropped off to sleep on Monday night was "North Platte".  

We can't really call North Platte a bust, because we did get to the one 
storm that generated a tornado warning just as it was getting going, but we 
saw no evidence of a tornado, merely some very nice wall clouds and a few 
gustnadoes.  Basically, there just wasn't enough of a sheared environment 
(wind shear) for much to happen.  

We did catch some pretty dramatic cloud shots, which we will be incorporating 
into our educational CD.  Our basic intent is to replace all public access 
pictures remaining in these presentations with our own photos.  We're about 
70% there; our hail segment being dramatically enhanced recently.

We got a lovely letter from a gentleman who has volunteered to donate the 
printer cartridges from his business to help our educational outreach program, 
and we've done a number of interviews this year, always trying to put our 
educational outreach in front of our chasing activities... taking care of the 
business of applying our combined knowledge base to whatever instance it can 
be best applied to.  Yes, to date this year we've tagged 7 tornadoes, but 
we're equally happy that we garnered some sponsors to help fund our programs, 
and we've reached a lot of people and have gotten a lot of prospects for our 
in-school program and our weather safety CD.

At any rate, with very little weather worth chasing on the horizon, Grizz, 
Jason and Greg headed home on Tuesday night, and Nancy, Al, Josh, and Chris 
took one last mad dash to the Wichita area on Wednesday... hopeful something 
might spark.  We got some great shots of oh-gee-more-cumulonimbus that rose 
majestically only to flop hopelessly.  

The severe weather prospects seemed to be almost back home for most of the 
remaining team, so after Wednesday's lightning show, it was decided that Josh 
would go towards home and look towards Minnesota weather, and Allan and Chris 
would head back through Illinois to Ohio, possibly catching the storms out 
there.  Nancy's plane doesn't fly out until Sunday, so she's sitting in a 
hotel room in KC banging out public relations correspondence, thank you's, 
and this newsletter... and looking at Saturday's outlook, which just may be 
interesting in Kansas City.  One more shot?  We'll have to see.