Goldsby-Norman OK Supercell, 10 Apr 5
Our first chase of the season was a short, two-county jaunt that ended no less adventurous than most far longer ones. After posting here, we (Elke, I and Donna) picked up my son from a church function at 2215Z then headed SW to an observation point on the S side of Goldsby OK. While still fighting traffic signals around the S side of Norman, we could see several weakly organized low-midlevel tails and bands connected to our storm, and presumed at least marginally supercellular organization. This was our first decent view of the base from Goldsby, looking SW…zoom image here.
The lowering wasn’t rotating, but we moved 2 WSW of Goldsby for a somewhat better view. The storm looked cold and cape starved,
but persisted, undergoing several occlusions. Here was one short lived wall cloud…(here is another shot)…then a flat rain free base…then another wall cloud with much stronger vertical motion and weak rotation… All the linked images look SW.
The storm got strung out, about the time we encountered the Thompson family. Here’s Rich’s glowing impression of the storm. Is he really impressed, or is it Memorex?
Shortly afterward, we spotted some kind of opaque material rising “under” a lowering, which turned out to be smoke in front of said lowering.
S of Goldsby again, we saw a deeply occluded old updraft, bifurcated clean off the new one and left floundering by itself off to the NW. It sported a short-lived wall cloud with rapidly rising scud on the NE edge (no pictures…too many trees), then fell apart as we found a good vantage. It was good to encounter Matt B in the inflow at Goldsby. We followed the storm into abNorman, then got ahead of it again on Highway 9. Driving right past our neighborhood with a mesocyclone 2 miles to its NW was a unique experience. A mile N of my house, in east Norman, the storm looked like this, looking NW, as we began to feel that dreaded outflow.
Though twilight was looming, and the storm seemed outflow dominant, we decided to follow the storm NE on the road grids of NE Norman and SE OKC for a little while. Then my 9 year old daughter, like the storm, started barfing. Chase over. Fortunately we were still just a couple miles from home. She stopped puking and, apparently, so did the storm. The tornado reports started coming afterward, when the storm was just barely out of view and I was preoccupied with a major cleanup job in the backseat of my car, on the side of Robinson St.
All in all, with one rather messy, nonmeteorological exception, it wasn’t a bad way to get the chase season started for us. Donna will be fine and so will my car (gotta love that Oxi-clean…that loudmouth bearded dude on late night TV actually is right!).
Roger