Great Plains Tornado Tours: April 2012

This day was my first guided tour chase that I did as part of my company. Mike, my first customer, an old college buddy, Jerry, and myself headed out on what was expected to be a huge, possibly deadly tornado outbreak. A rare day 2 High risk outlook was issued for the large storm system that would be moving through the Central Plains.
We left Omaha later than we wanted to, around 230 and headed west on I-80. Morning and early afternoon thunderstorms were slow to clear out and were killing instability and also the placement of a warm front that was expected to lift north through Nebraska. We made it to York, NE and then headed south towards the Kansas border. When the atmosphere still hadn't recovered by 430, we decided to keep going south into Kansas and hopefully catch one of the intense long track tornado producing supercells that were moving northeast out of central Kansas.
One cell southwest of Salina, had a tornado on the ground for over an hour as we headed towards it and I-70. We were within 30 miles or so of the storm when it suddenly started to fall apart. We continued on though hoping to get some good structure shots at least. All of the sudden, the storm re-intensified and began to look again on radar as we approached it. The base came into view and there was a large bowl shaped funnel most of the way to the ground to our southwest near the town Solomon, KS. By the time we found a good road to pull off of the highway onto, the funnel had dissipated but a rapidly rotating wall cloud persisted.
We watched the wall cloud for a while as it slowly weakened. We wanted to get closer to the storm and saw a road a couple of miles down the road to the west off of I-70. Just as we got back to Hwy 15, the storm rapidly formed a funnel, so we stopped again to take pics and video. The funnel quickly formed into a tornado that widened into a stovepipe. We stayed there and watched it move rapidly northeast for the next 5-7 minutes or so. It started to rope out as it moved away to the north and we finally jumped down to the interstate to move back west down to the next exit. We turned north at the Solomon exit and the tornado strengthened briefly before again starting to rope out. This time it roped out for at least another 5 minutes!! It was beautiful to see! We stopped for some pics after getting closer again, waiting for it to finally die. It gave us one last cool image as the middle part of the tornado dissipated but the part along the ground persisted for another 45 seconds or so.
We then headed home as it was nearly dark and dodged some more severe storms that mainly had hail and high winds. It was a little tricky at times though as these new storms were now moving at 55-70 mph!
It was a very successful first chase, as both Mike and Jerry saw their first tornadoes ever!