24 Apr 6 Anadarko messy supercell
SHORT: Saw messy, rainy, nontornadic supercell near Anadarko, got on El Reno storm too late for tornadoes.
LONG: I was greeted after a night shift by elevated, ACCAS storms that were producing thunder and light rain, and that were somewhat photogenic. [IMAGE] As it turns out the .03″ of rain would be all we would get for the day, and Norman remains rain-starved. Then came a few hours’ sleep before three battle-hardened storm intercept warriors would meet for another round of abuse dished out by the atmosphere.
At 3: 30 p.m. (2030Z), Rich, Corey and I left Norman. We wandered through El Reno up to southern Kingfisher County, awaiting development that didn’t happen while watching the distant elevated storms, over outflow air to our NE. Seeing some evidence of thickening low clouds on VIS imagery, we wandered back S through El Reno to put ourselves in position to intercept any development therefrom.
The storm that initially fired all by itself near Carnegie moved ENE, then E, then S of E during its mature phase. At the time, this was the only show nearby, so we zigzagged a short distance SW to intercept it N of Anadarko. [IMAGE] A pronounced low- and middle-level mesocyclone was evident…along with an increasing amount of precip in the meso area and to its SW along the flank.
Uh oh. We’ve seen messy, rainy storms drown in their own outflow, while a minority somehow recovered enough to produce a tornado (i.e., the recent example of the 30 March storm near Buffalo KS).
The storm didn’t choke out and die, however; it hung on for the better part of another hour and a half, intermittently trying to wrap an occlusion amidst lots of rain, scud and intermittent outflow surges. [IMAGE] || [IMAGE] The base of another storm was evident in the distant SW, NW of Lawton. In the following soomed photograph you can see it, along with the two tallest Wichtas peaks of Mt. Scott (left) and Sheridan (middle). [IMAGE]
We were watching another strung-out attempt at a wrap-up E of Cement, with our original storm, when we heard word on the radio of tornadoes near El Reno — the place through which we had travelled twice in the previous 2-3 hours. Ouch. Corey had lost his data connection, so we were not aware that a new, discrete storm had gone up to the north of ours, after we already had committed to the Carnegie-Anadarko supercell. Even if we had been, Rich and I figured we probably wouldn’t have given up on our storm in time to see the El Reno hoses anyway.
Still, we bolted N in time to see some interesting golden/brown ambient lighting of what was left of the El Reno storm, at and just after sunset. [IMAGE] One or two old, cold-looking occlusions were visible with wall clouds [IMAGE], but the storm clearly was sucking in 65 deg F air (measured at our location S of Mustang) left behind by our Anadarko supercell. So our storm not only failed to produce a tube, it killed the one to the N [IMAGE]. The streak of light in this image is a TV chopper flying around the decaying carcass of the formerly tornadic El Reno storm. [IMAGE].
And so it goes. We hope for better fortunes in the next storm observing jaunt, and congratulate those who happened upon the developing El Reno storm and stuck with it.
April Fools Day “Bustola, Bill”
Like many others, we had higher hopes for this day than the answer key which ultimately was provided to us by the atmosphere. Elke and I rode along with Dave Gold and his friend Bob from Orlando, who had flown into OKC just for this event. [Ouch.]
We headed out to Clinton before committing to a NE Panhandle play (along the dryline, hoping for late initiation and moisture return) or SW OK/NW TX (better moisture, more concerns about discrete versus clustered failure modes). We noticed a subtle dryline bulge to the WNW while drivig through the Shattuck area, as well as discrete development NE of Pampa. Things looked promising. Onward we zigzagged into Lipscomb County, targeting either of two discrete storms to our WSW and SW that had showed some effort to become supercellular. But both storms eventually turned out to be high based pieces of junk, devoid of enough structure to be worth shooting photos. Roger H called Dave to let him know the southern storm was nothing special; and when Roger is underwhelmed about the action, you *know* it must suck. 🙂
We ended up at sunset eating sandwiches bought from that funky new grocery store on the S side of Shattuck, while Rich called and told me some baldfaced lie (April Fool’s day, remember) about two tornadoes he saw with the storm near Clinton. We headed back just behind the heaviest precip from the squall line, enjoying a sporadic but beautiful show of CGs and crawlers int he trailing precip region. Some of the crawler eruptions would last 5 seconds or more and cover large areas of the sky. It was too dispersed and intermittent for photography, however, and we were rather fatigued anyway.
On some of the hills S of Darouzett, we encountered Alnado and also met Bill Gargan and his wife. They and a garishly painted TV van from AMA were the only other chasers we saw.
Chasing with Dave again for the first time in 16 years was cool and brought back a lot of old memories from the NSSL IOT&E2 days. [Thanks Dr_DAG for inviting us along!] It was almost worth the time and effort, just for old times’ sake, to hear Dave tell Bill once again: “Bustola Bill, Bustola.” This was Dave’s first chase of the year, so the effort wasn’t totally wasted as we were able to test out various equipment that Dave is planning to use this year for his tour excursions.
Having seen both GR-Level-3 and Baron satellite radar on different chases so far this year, I must say that real time radar *can* be useful, especially at night for avoiding trouble or in very low visibility daytime situations. If one could have the continuous connectivity of Baron with the superior display capabilities of Gibson Ridge, that would be a very popular product.
But it’s far too easy for users to get too engrossed in the laptop screen, at the expense of other very important aspects of situational awareness. I’m no Type A multitasker, and found it difficult to analytically interpret then deduce cogent answers to questions about what was on the radar screen, while still keeping track of navigational software, Internet weather data, stopping and restarting software that was flaking out repeatedly (Baron) and actually watching the sky, in a moving vehicle. Too much going on at once!
Attention gets spread too thin and precludes appropriately deep concentration on any given aspect. Maybe this is why I don’t mind chasing with spazmos like Rich, Ryan, Dave and RJ, who somehow have mastered the ability to walk, talk, chew gum, look two different directions with each eyeball, eat a bag of stale trail mix and scratch their butts all at once. 🙂 Meanwhile I usually just drive, which is something that needs and deserves the type of deep, full, singleminded concentration that my synapses are best hardwired to deliver.
Now it looks like we may be faced with a similar problem for Wednesday (the “Day before the Day”) — somewhat late/mistimed big wave, questions about moisture return, convective mode and orientation of kinematic fields.