I Saw a Real Funnel Cloud!!!

Reminds me of a business trip many years ago. I was traveling from Kansas City to Springfield, MO by auto and I ran into a thunder storm. I had the radio on and a warning was given that a tornado was on the ground in Nevada. I next saw a road sign, "Entering Nevada". And there it was to the right of my vehicle, big and coming right at me. I was going southeast and the line of traffic sped up greatly getting away from it. They say tornadoes generally head in a northeasterly direction, so we were going in the right direction.

That was as close as I want to get to one.

We had significant amount of damage in our area last night. Tornado touch down about 10 miles from our home. I heard siren from a local town and storm came in very quickly at 11 pm with brisk winds and hail.  No damage in our neighborhood.  Several people injured in Chicago area.  It was covered on the National News tonight.  

Twice I've seen green skies, the first time was in the mid-70's. I was skydiving in Maryland when we saw a green wall coming. Three guys went up for one last jump before the front hit. They didn't get the formation together in time so one guy popped his chute early, the other two waited and popped chutes later. The guy who popped first got sucked up to 15,000 feet and was deposited about 15 miles from the drop zone (DZ). The other two got sucked up to about 10,000 feet and were dropped about 10 miles away. All three managed to hitch rides back to the DZ. The jump plane pilot was trying to land but was at a 45° angle to the landing strip. The DZ manager went out to the end of the runway to wave him off, at about the same time the pilot decided it wasn't going to be a good landing and headed to Baltimore.

The second time we were headed to my sister-in-law's place in Michigan. We saw a green cloud front as we were coming north. My wife said, "That looks interesting!" I said, "That looks scary." Sure enough, it was a derecho, in fact it was recorded:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_derecho_events

August 2015 Northwest Michigan Derecho August 2, 2015 Derecho over northwestern Lower Michigan, damaging trees at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and cutting off power to many residents of Traverse City; also impacting the penultimate night of the Traverse City Film Festival

Fortunately she had power at her house, but many in her area did not. My brother-in-law gassed up his generator and loaned it to someone from their church. Sleeping Bear Dunes was closed, but after the weather cleared we were able to enjoy many sites and activities around northern Michigan.

I've been in two tornadoes. One touched down a block from my apartment when I lived in Galveston, TX. It looked like the world was coming to an end. The next one was in Peninsula State Park in Wisconsin. I was in fifth grade and watch it throwing boats on the other side of the bay.