Every once in a while, somebody captures a shot of Mother Nature at her best... or worst, whichever way you look at it.  But many times, she provides pictures that you can't help but look at in awe.

I'm sure this posting won't do the picture justice since I had to shrink it down in order to make it fit within my blog article.  Nevertheless, it was captured by KAKE Stormchaser Paul Marinsky on Tuesday.

Speaking of storm chasing, I've gotten to take the KAKE FirstCam truck out several times already this storm season and I must say that I'm meeting the nicest people out in Western Kansas.  One lady in Hill City was so concerned about my safety last week that she told me where she lived and said I could run into her basement and take shelter if I needed to.  Fortunately, I didn't have to do that, but I was wondering if there would be a massive tornado out of that storm because the hail was so big.

Generally, you can judge a storm's strength by the size of the hail it drops.  The bigger the hail, the stronger the updraft.  The frozen water droplets continue to be sucked up into the core of the storm and re-coated with another layer of ice.  Eventually, when they become too heavy, they fall to the ground.  So when you have a storm that drops softball sized hail, you know you have a monster.  And that's exactly what happened in Northern Kansas last week.

After getting home to Wichita, Meteorologist Jay Prater told me there had been a report of a half-mile wide tornado near Beloit that did a number on a couple of farm properties.  Thankfully, nobody up there was hurt.