Today was only supposed to be a marginal chase day, but proved to be a rather exciting non-tornadic chase. We traveled northeast out of Wichita towards Emporia when "the" Topeka storm was in its earliest stages. We caught up to the storm when we hit Emporia, got gas and a few snacks, and got back on the road. However, long embarrassing story short, a wrong turn turned into an hour-long adventure on dirt roads. When we finally got back to the interstate the storm was well ahead, and we were ready to throw in the towel and concentrate on a weaker storm to the west. I texted a fellow chaser with the news and wished him luck, but he responded with "get here if you can." For the next half hour we quickly (but carefully!) made our way to Topeka. As we got closer we began to see the structure of the storm, and snapped a few quick pics:
We arrived just in time to see this impressive view from the interstate. It loomed over Topeka for a good bit, but thankfully never touched down.
As we drove up the interstate the rotation was eerily close, and we were forced to pull over and wait for the storm to move away before we could exit and get in better position.
We then followed the storm through the backwoods of Topeka until dark. We were unable to get too many pictures because our three-man team was busy navigating and driving through most of the chase. As far as we could see the storm never spawned a tornado.
A big thank you for the WKU chase crew for helping navigate the Kansas back roads. This was our view for the last hour of the chase:
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