Nondescript NW Texas Event
17 Mar 2008
Elke and I departed Norman around 1130 CDT with little hope of seeing any significant tornadoes, but some for seeing a supercell, perhaps a brief spinup if a bunch of planets, stars, dominoes and dice all fell the right way. Alas, the answer was…none of the above.
Basically, not much happened on this chase. I suppose that’s a good thing in that I didn’t suddenly begin puking, or run into a black cow at night at 70 mph (though a dozen roadside deer gave us great concern for a few seconds). All in all, the experience was very much a non-experience.
We grabbed lunch at McAlister’s Deli in Wichita Falls (free wi-fi) and watched the radar signatures of a strung-out line of mostly elevated storms in SW OK, and of few small storms out of reach to our SW around ABI that struggled and died. It turns out that one of those ABI area showers produced an apparent non-supercell tornado — a brief, very narrow condensation cone near the big wind farm, S of I-20. Other towers tried to erupt off-and-on, all afternoon, in that area. Those fizzled meekly, definitely cowardly and not courageous convection. We were in a relatively warm spot for awhile, until the ever-thickening cirrus canopy suppressed heating too much.
By late afternoon we had wandered down to Hastings’ coffee shop, also with free-wi-fi, and more importantly, on hallowed ground in the path of the 10 Apr 1979 monster tornado. Elke did some reading while I watched flat-topped, frontal towers get crushed like bugs under my boots by convective inhibition, slowly creeping our way from the NW. Finally a couple of storms went up S and N of ABI, the latter just E of Hamlin. The southern one was unreachable before dark for us. Given the shorter distance, and likely NNE motion, we opted to head down toward Seymour and Throckmorton to catch whatever was left of the Hamlin storm before dark. I feared it would get undercut by the front, and it was.
The dark anvil plume, spreading into the blanket of brighter cirrus high in the SW sky, turned into a dark smudge in low stratus by the time we rolled into Seymour. Just S of Seymour, we got pelted for a few minutes by subsevere hail and some moderate rain, and saw a few CGs. We threw in the towel in the diffused sunset light near Throckmorton, seeing lightning and distant towers with the complex near ABI, then headed back home after a late dinner in Wichita Falls.
Sorry — no photos! I didn’t shoot any, a rather rare occurrence even for the most lame storm intercept trips.
2008 Storm Intercept Season Begins
Messy Supercells from Gotebo to Binger
2 Mar 2008
SHORT: Observed 2 mesocyclonic wrap-ups within a broken band of storms in southwest OK…had trouble with a road closure.
LONG:
Still somewhat uncertain as to whether to continue our early target toward the SW or revise toward the W, I met up with Rich T and Jim LaDue and headed out the Highway 9 turnpike extension. One area of enhanced convective buildups already had become evident on satellite imagery before we left — near I-40 in far west-central OK. Would any discrete supercells evolve out of this activity before being undercut by the intense Arctic cold front? Or should we gamble southwestward after somewhat less certain storm initiation and mode, but in the initial target area where the front may not be a destructive factor for a little while longer?
We made this choice nearly on a whim as we reached the turnpike, choosing to head down toward the Wichita Mountains instead of out I-40 toward Weatherford. Had we done the latter, we may or may not have chosen the eventual tornado producer near Eagle City, and may or may not have stuck with it as the frontal cloud line approached ominously from the W. From what I’ve read so far, just about every possibility played out in the world of storm observers who sprayed themselves all across western OK and NW TX, their huge numbers and the law of averages each virtually assuring that any needle-in-haystack tornado would be witnessed by somebody.
Even though we weren’t among those select few somebodies, we did have a pleasant and worthwhile storm observing excursion in some beautiful countryside, along the north edge of the Wichita Mountains.
We turned W at Elgin exit as a band of echoes formed in a double-dryline structure, cruising W past the Porter Hill bait shop along a paved road leading to OK-58. We turned NW over the Slick Hills, liberally festooned with wind turbines merrily spinning in the southerlies, then turned generally W along OK-19, seeing anvil material through the haze and broken low clouds. Continuing W, the low clouds cleared away as they often do to reveal the storms themselves, which we first observed for about 30-45 minutes from an outstanding vantage point 4 NE Cooperton.
Visually, this was a high-based, broken line of cores with intermittent, intervening updraft bases, one of which formed a ragged, scuddy, distant wall cloud to the NW that I believe Jim attempted to shoot. I wandered down to the road and concentrated on another updraft area between cores to the W, which also developed a shallow wall cloud (wide angle). This moved NE toward Gotebo with weak low level cyclonic shear, occasional bouts of moderately rapid upward motion, and intermittent scud reinforcement from below (sequence looking NW: 1, 2, 3, 4).
We spent just a little too long observing and photographing it from that great overlook, before driving the few miles W to OK 54 and N into Gotebo. During this stretch we heard about the tornado S of Canton and well to our N, out of reach.
As for our storm, the mesocyclone, which post-mortem radar examination indicates was a good deal stronger aloft than anything we saw at cloud base, was being hacked into from the rear by precip and never could seem to wind up a sufficiently tight circulation coil to give us cause for tornadic concern. It crossed the road just N of us and just S of Gotebo, so we drove through pea hail and moderate rain on the western fringes of what may pass for the “hook”. We then headed E to Mountain View, again getting just barely into the inflow region. By then, a tornado warning was out, though the siren of Mountain View wasn’t sounding, and the gas station was open for a much needed refill of fuel.
Our E route out of town — Highway 9 — was closed, apparently because of a couple of bridges out. Fortunately we found a paved E option 2.3 miles NNE of Mountain View that took us E to OK 58, with the side benefit of bypassing Carnegie. The north leg of this zig-zag showed us that our storm was turning to precip-enshrouded mush, and darkness soon would close in.
Imagine our surprise, then, when we cruised down into Binger to hear the sirens wailing as if the Soviet nukes were on their way. We ridiculed this a little, but whomever made that decision may have been onto something, if for the wrong reasons. No red warning was out that would compel such a reaction, but a small mesocirculation was becoming evident to our SW, via Rich’s intermittent cell phone + laptop radar feed.
An inflection point or concavity in the line became apparent visually to our WSW as we headed away from Binger on OK 152, then a mile S on US 281. Looking W into fading light, I snapped a still of the wall cloud that formed, which sported the best low level motion we saw all day. Alas, it got reamed by a tremendous northward precip surge within just a few minutes, never to be seen again.
With light nearly gone, we turned back toward Norman from Anadarko and got back to town in time to inhale the last refreshing lungfuls of moist sector air for many more days. So concluded a short and pleasant first chase of 2008, a beginning to what I hope is a fruitful season of dining at the smorgasbord of atmospheric violence.