Hail coats the ground as storms pummel the Plains

AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from the scene of severe storms in Kansas on Aug. 7.

Transcript

00:00 Well, today, Elmini Lawback, meteorologist here, has been chasing the storms across the

00:04 plains and he joins us from Thomas County, Kansas.

00:07 Tony, how's it going?

00:10 Well, it has been a rough night.

00:15 As you mentioned, we've seen up to softball-sized hail in Kansas, dangerous winds, and a dust

00:20 storm warning to boot here.

00:21 We're going to go a little walk and talk here.

00:23 We're going to show you kind of what's going on behind me.

00:26 Right up there is kind of the outflow of these storms.

00:28 These are outflow-dominant storms.

00:30 It's why you haven't heard a lot in the way of tornado reports, because these storms are

00:35 just pushing out a lot of air.

00:37 You see kind of over in that direction, that's kind of the area where the dust storm warning

00:40 is currently kind of happening right now.

00:42 We haven't seen a lot of it here, but we have seen some plumes of some heavier dust.

00:46 We're going to show you that to you at the next hour, but let's show you what happened

00:49 earlier.

00:50 This was just outside of Colby.

00:51 If you were with us at 7 o'clock, you saw that I was kind of waiting out a storm that

00:56 moved just to the east of Colby, and it looked like it snowed.

01:01 There was a lot of small hail.

01:03 Didn't see anything bigger than one inch in diameter, despite the storm being warned for

01:06 softballs, but a lot of times it's hard for the radar to determine the difference between

01:11 very, very large hail and very, very amounts, large amounts of hail.

01:16 That was what was the case with this particular storm.

01:18 We saw several inches of hail cover the ground, cover the road, slow traffic.

01:22 A lot of drivers were just kind of hanging out, waiting for that to come through.

01:26 I imagine it was very, very loud, but nobody lost any windows.

01:29 Again, you need a lot bigger hail than what we saw with that going on, but we're going

01:33 to bring it back here live again.

01:34 We're kind of showing you there is a little bit of a wall cloud back in that area right

01:39 now.

01:40 Again, a little bit of rotation, but it's not really going to be ingesting in a lot

01:43 of air, so thinking this is going to be, again, dust storm warning and severe thunderstorm

01:47 warning in effect for this cell here, Melissa.

01:50 All right, Tony Lahm back there doing a lot of the storm chasing for us across the area.

01:55 Across the Southwest.

01:56 Well, coming up, or across the West, rather.

01:59 Coming up in the Southwest, we'll continue to sizzle.