Stormy weather moved back into Northeast Kansas on May 12, 2010. Meteorologist Ed Bloodsworth went out chasing, anticipating severe storms capable of producing isolated tornadoes, while I stayed in the KTKA studio with Chief Meteorologist Matt Miller, to help him cover the storms on-air. (One unique thing about our company is that we have two television stations in Northeast Kansas, KTKA 49 ABC News based out of Topeka and 6News Lawrence, which focuses specifically on the Lawrence area. Severe weather is one of many occasions we combine our weather teams to provide even better severe weather coverage, with more eyes on the weather.) The first photograph is a “behind-the-scenes” weather picture from the KTKA studio. You can see Matt updating our 49 Storm Team Facebook page. If you look at the radar, you can also see a few storms pushing into our area with tornado warnings. We didn’t end up seeing any tornadoes, most of the storms weakened as they moved into our area.

While our area didn’t have any tornadoes, we had a lot of lightning, heavy rain and damaging winds. The pictures below were taken as heavy rain moved over our studio.

Between storms, we saw a little bit of sunshine peaking through, which made for a beautiful sunset, with a lot of colors in the sky. You can see the color from the sunset also reflecting off the water on the ground.

If you look closely at the next picture, you can see a rainbow showing up on the far right.

The heavy rain continued to push out of the area during the morning on May 13, 2010. By the afternoon, a little sunshine returned to the area. You can see a turtle basking in the sunshine in a pond at Gage Park. Last time I was by this pond, the flowers weren’t in bloom yet on the lily pads, but they were this time.