My cousin and his good buddy from the Notts and South Yorkshire have been and gone, I think they found our humid weather to be lovely. Had a great visit, showed them oil wells,cattle, and crops. After telling them if they heard the tornado siren last night(half jokingly) I turned on the TV to find we were in a tornado watch until 5 am Friday morning, our weather radio went off at 3 but it was a false alarm. They were fascinated and frightened a little it seemed by the prospect of a tornado, as they have now headed to Iowa they missed any possible action. One mentioned watching the movie "Twister" twice and wondering how accurate it was.
Tonight since about 7:30 pm the 3 network stations, KAKE, KSN, and KWCH have been virtually non stop weather coverage. For a time it appeared that Greensburg was going to be hit once again by a major tornado, the information so far is sketchy but best I can tell either it lifted and went over, or passed to the south. At least one tornado was one half mile wide. At 10:30pm 7 counties were reporting some degree of damage from houses destroyed to power lines down and 6 counties were under tornado warnings. With tornadoes comes large hail, so undoubtedly more than one western Kansas farmer will wake up tomorrow morning with less wheat to harvest than he had this morning. The aftermath of these storms always includes some knothead in Wichita complaining to the TV stations about breaking into their favorite ballgame or program with weather warnings, as if those of us out in the sticks don't count for anything. Thank goodness so far the TV stations still care enough to ignore all that.
Mrs. KF turned in some time ago, the weather service is vague but they tell us these storms may reach us towards morning, whether or not they remain tornadic is a little iffy. It does appear if we get a turn from this front it will be tomorrow afternoon. I reminded Mrs. KF that if the radio goes off tonight we take that seriously, we do not simply turn it off and go back to sleep. Our household is opposite of my parents. There, mom stews and dad sleeps, here I keep watch and Amy sleeps. The nice thing about the weather radio is you can go to sleep with relative confidence you will not be snuck up on in the night by a twister.
The biggest tornado outbreaks in the past in eastern Kansas have been in very late May through the first 10 days of June, at least the ones I know of. I believe the Topeka tornado and the Emporia tornado(the biggest ones of those two towns) hit on the same date about 8 years apart. The weather is quite humid(70%) and warm(maybe 75F at 11pm). With strong winds from the south, if nothing changes it would appear we have a good chance of some bad stuff. Too bad my English friends left, they might have gotten to live a scene from "Twister" in real life.