00:00It was 10 years ago this weekend in 2015 when 38 tornadoes struck the High Plains.
00:10It was the largest single tornado outbreak in recorded history that far west that late in the year.
00:15November 16th was a well-advertised event and I had driven halfway from my home in Illinois to Tulsa the night before to position for the next day.
00:23And when I awakened that morning, forecast and social media were buzzing with the Texas target, but I stayed with my initial northern target, positioning in the Oklahoma panhandle where I waited for three hours before my storm went up.
00:36And when it did, I had less than 90 minutes before nightfall.
00:41As the storm drifted northeast toward the Kansas border, it exploded from a little shower into this beastly supercell, pouring out hail as it moved toward the town of Liberal, Kansas, and covering the ground with half dollar signs.
00:52Fortunately, it cleared Liberal just in time as the storm put down the first of three tornadoes northeast of the city.
01:01Tornado on the ground, fog north of Liberal.
01:04It grew into a mile-wide monster as night fell, and it went on a 51-mile path.
01:09At one point, a brief satellite tornado came down next to the main tornado, and as that main tornado dissipated west of Ensign, a third tornado came down on the same storm a few miles to its west.
01:21I caught the initial moments of that third tornado before my chase was ended at this scene, a semi that was picked up and flipped across US 56 by that third tornado.
01:30I saw three of the nine tornadoes that touched down in Kansas that night, with 29 other tornadoes touching down across Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.
01:38While tornadoes are common to this region in the spring, an event like this, this late in the fall, as one meteorologist from Dodge City put it, was unprecedented.
01:47For Akiweather, I'm meteorologist Tony Laubach.
01:50For Akiweather, I'm meteorologist Tony Laubach.
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