The area’s severe weather outbreak has attracted weather experts from Illinois to the area to document the storms.
Storm chasers with WGN TV in Chicago were in Winfield late Thursday as part of a weather feature the station is doing about tracking volatile spring weather.
The station’s chief meteorologist Tom Skilling ? who’s spent more than four decades covering the weather ? did a live a broadcast from downtown Winfield and shared footage his crew collected chasing storms in Kansas. An 11-member crew is spending a week in the region collecting video and still photos of the spring storm season.
Until this week, Skilling personally never had seen a tornado. That changed when the crew met a multi-vortex tornado on Highway 10 in northern Oklahoma.
"We embarked on this chase, we started last weekend," Skilling said. "And we essentially said we’re going to take a week and follow the storms wherever they lead us."
The storms led the crew to Cowley County where they stopped at Captain Tony’s Pizza & Pasta Emporium on Main. Staff there stayed open an hour late so the storm chasers could have their first sit-down meal in several days.
The storm chasers shared storm stories over a table full of pizza, barbecue chicken and a couple pitchers of beer.
"Everyone’s been so good to us," Skilling said. "We had a ball here."
Skilling noted the 20-degree drop in temperature during the two hours he was in Winfield and said everywhere the crew has gone they’ve been fortunate to arrive as severe weather rolled in.
"It’s storming," he said. "Everywhere we go."
The footage of the live broadcast, from the parking lot of the Union State Bank drive-through location at Ninth and Manning, is below:
