I first met Chris Novy upon relocating to Oklahoma back in 2002, first as the moderator of the wx-chase e-mail list, and later from his NSWW presentations on storm spotter safety. Chris is a multimedia wizard, an ethical chaser, and a tireless advocate for safe spotting. His video-rich presentations are always eye-catching, amusing, informative, and occasionally sobering. His message is always the same – no spotter report, no video clip, no smidgen of name recognition, is worth losing your life for.
Chris has gained some undeserved notoriety, chiefly for calling out famous storm chasers when they engage in unsafe and illegal behavior while chasing. Like a good journalist, however, he seeks to verify his sources, and often provides video evidence that he shot himself, unedited. Not surprisingly, his YouTube channel is stacked deep with abusive, ad hominem attack comments.
Chris was out spotting on Tuesday, 24 May 2011 in his car full of video gear, when he was manhandled by the titanic, rain-wrapped El Reno, Oklahoma tornado. By all accounts, this tornado was shrouded by opaque rain curtains, and so large as to be disorienting to those chasing near it. The way Chris tells it, he thought he knew where the tornado was moving based on previous radar images. But the storm hooked right and the circulation grew, dragging the huge tornado directly over Chris’ vehicle.
The irony of the predicament was not lost on Chris – “Mr. Spotter Safety” got his butt kicked by a tornado. Instead of retreating in humiliation, he recognized the opportunity for a profoundly teachable moment, “a personal story to share with others in training.” Two of his in-car cameras survived and recorded the entire incident. He posted some of his dashcam video on YouTube and posted his gripping first-hand account on wx-chase. In doing so, he made a point that he himself likes to make in his spotter / chaser safety presentations: There is no point in getting right underneath a tornado to get a “money shot,” because you can’t see a damn thing!
Not surprisingly, Chris has endured no end of additional villification and judgment, particularly from those who were already angry at him for calling out unsafe chase practices of others. He’s been variously accused of exploitation, fame-grabbing, and outright hypocrisy. (Commentators appear to willfully forget that Chris is not making a penny off the publication of any of this footage, because YouTube is free. Not to mention that his primary chase vehicle, “pimped out” with camera gear, was totaled.) In contrast, I find that Chris has been tremendously humble about his “near death experience.” He endures the slings and arrows because he feels that the potential lesson he can bring to spotters and chasers across the country is worth the abuse.
I applaud Chris Novy for sharing his harrowing experience, and for doing so quickly and with humility and maturity. I’ve always made a point to keep a respectful distance from tornadoes, but I’ve certainly learned from his experience that tornadoes must be given an even wider berth than normal when they are large, rain-wrapped, and difficult to see. Tornadoes look contained, and perhaps even a bit tame, on a television screen, but Mother Nature always has the ace up her sleeve.
I did not chase on 24 May 2011, a day that many Oklahomans will find difficult to forget. I had signed up months before for an NSF workshop entitled “Science: Becoming the Messenger.” My husband, in jest, admonished me for signing up for an all-day workshop in late May: “You just know there’s going to be a big tornado outbreak that day.” Of course, it was just as likely there would not be.
About week ahead of time, I could tell that an interesting weather scenario was, indeed, in the offing for 24 May. A trough was progged to slide out of the Rockies that Tuesday, and all the other parameters (shear, moisture, and lift) appeared favorable for a significant severe weather event. It looked similar to 10 May 2010, when a north-south oriented line of supercells swept across Oklahoma at ludicrous speeds (50-60 mph), forcing VORTEX2 teams to scramble to collect coordinated data sets. The NWS – WFO for Norman had been generating public information for days in advance advising people to be prepared for another tornado outbreak. With 10 May 2010 still fresh in the minds of many, and the tragedy at Joplin still in the headlines, Oklahomans took notice.
I am not one to cancel long-held plans based on forecast models for the next week; I’ve been burned more than once when such a setup unravels. In addition, one of the workshop presenters was Chris Mooney, one of my favorite bloggers and part-time host of the Point of Inquiry podcast (which I listen to with some regularity). In addition, I’d seen multiple tornadoes in southern Oklahoma the previous Saturday, a day when many others did not. So, I stuck to my guns and did not cancel my workshop attendance.
In the meantime, my husband was tapped to navigate the NOXP mobile radar for NSSL’s storm intercept team. (Don Burgess, the usual coordinator for that vehicle, was off delivering a keynote speech at the IEEE radar conference in Kansas City.) Before I left the house that morning, I left him a note on the mirror, wishing him good luck and many safe deployments.
When I arrived at the NWC, the NSF workshop organizers told us that the ~100 of us were going to learn how to craft messages for TV, radio, Powerpoint, blogs (hello!), and social media, including Twitter. Those of us with Twitter accounts were asked to “tweet” the workshop using the hash tag #nsfmessenger, which the organizers monitored from the front table. I’ve been using a Twitter accounts to reflect links to my posts on this blog, but on this day my Twitter feed veritably exploded with key points made by the organizers and presenters.
Just before lunch, a female researcher from Africa got up to practice her message that female African scientists are sorely in need of funding. She concluded with what she said was an old African proverb, “When you educate women, you educate a nation,” since women transmit their learning to their families and communities. I could not independently verify that this was indeed an African proverb, so I put quote marks around it before I tweeted it. The quote was re-tweeted, first by people within the workshop, and then by many more people outside the workshop. I got a few sarcastic tweets back to the effect of, “Umm, when you educate women, you only educate 50% of a nation, dumbass.” I chose to let these trolls stew in their own ignorance.
After lunch, awareness of the weather situation outside began to wax. I used the workshop hashtag to link other workshop participants to weather information. My attention became increasingly divided between the workshop presentations and radar images on my laptop showing a line of supercells taking shape in Western Oklahoma. The warning polygon colors quickly shifted from “severe thunderstorm” to “tornado” as spotters began peppering the maps with reports of wall clouds, funnel clouds, and finally tornadoes. Initially, all of the storms vectored past us to the north, but more convection took shape to our southwest, and one of the resulting supercells storms was aimed right at Norman One of the workshop organizers asked me if it would be safe for him to drive back to Stillwater. Initially I said yes, but after another KTLX volume came in, accompanied by a solid cluster of tornado reports crawling toward Guthrie and Stillwater, I changed my advice and told him to stay.
Mid-afternoon, I was astonished to receive an e-mail from Jon Hamilton of NPR, requesting an interview for a story about tornado safety. I e-mailed him back saying I was willing to do so, but that it would have to wait until tomorrow (Wednesday), and he agreed. (The interview took place on Wednesday and the resulting story aired on Thursday.) I’m just tickled that I was sitting in a workshop on how to communicate science to the media, and I got contacted by a member of the national media for an interview right in the middle of it! I did, indeed, fill out an “interview triangle” worksheet and had it in front of me while I was on the phone with Mr. Hamilton. I can only imagine that the workshop organizers were pleased to have this immediate feedback.
Around 4:00 p.m., the University of Oklahoma sent out a robotext to its staff indicating that the University was going to close at 4:30 p.m. Many offices, citing heightened awareness of the weather situation, had already sent their staff home. The workshop organizers suspended our activities. (I was just about to have a practice blog post vetted by Chris Mooney – darn!) Instead, I led Chris and some of the other NSF workshop participants up to the NWC observation deck to watch the storm move in.
There wasn’t much to see – just a boring gray veil of rain approaching from the west. I knew, based on RadarScope, that it presaged much worse things – like large hail. Then the tornado reports started materializing, some of which were from NWC staff and students out chasing. A tornado warning was issued that included the NWC, and the CSOs made a PA instructing everyone to move downstairs. I escorted some of the NSF workshop folks down to the first floor auditoriums, which I was astonished to find were almost entirely full already. People had brought in their families, dogs, cats, and even a few overnight bags to ride out the storm. Everyone had to sign in at the front door, per usual procedure. The rooms were orderly, but crowded.
Image from a camera mounted on the mast of the National Weather Center, which I believe shows a dissipating tornado to the southwest, over Goldsby/Blanchard. Image courtesy of P. Laws, K. Keys, and the OU College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences. Contrast has been enhanced to show the funnel.Once the NSF visitors (many of whom were from Washington, D.C. and other less tornado-prone locales) were ensconced below ground, I went back out to the atrium. Reports began to come in via TV and ham radio of a tornado southwest of the NWC. I briefly considered chasing in my own personal vehicle, but reports of rain-wrapped tornadoes all over the metro area made me hesitant to chase without an experienced partner in the passenger seat. Looking out the windows in that direction, I could see a barber pole updraft approaching the NWC, and hail that I estimate to have been 1″ to 1.5″ in diameter began clacking loudly against the NWC windows and skylights. I yearned to go up a floor or two to get a look at the sky over the trees, but decided to be a good role model and not create any more headaches for the CSOs, who were having enough trouble preventing curious people from wandering around.
I took a peek back in the auditorium, which by then was stifling and malodorous from the wall-to-wall hordes of anxious people and wet dogs. When reports indicated that the tornado southwest of the NWC had dissipated, some people tried to leave, only to be corralled back inside because the circulation reorganized to spawn another tornado east of Norman, near Pink, OK. When the “all clear” was finally given, the mass exodus to the parking lot reminded me of that after a major league sporting event. I applaud the CSOs for their calm handling of the crowds.
Do I regret not chasing on a “no duh” day when almost all of my friends went out and saw tornadoes? Yes and no. Each tornado is unique, and you never get the opportunity to see the same tornado twice. However, it was also a day that challenged even the most experienced chasers. A friend of mine (who teaches spotter safety) ended up in an extremely hairy situation when he unintentionally strayed too close to the Hinton / El Reno / Piedmont tornado. He was uninjured (thank goodness), but lost his chase vehicle and a large amount of camera gear as a result of the too-close encounter. I can’t help thinking that it could just as easily have been me, especially if I’d gone chasing alone.
Once the danger had passed, I got a text message from my husband that the NOXP radar had made a successful data collection on the tornado near Canton Lake, OK. (Link goes to my husband’s video.) Later, I learned that Howie’s group, operating the RaXPol and MWR, both collected data on the Hinton / El Reno / Piedmont tornado. While great / unique data collection can never replace people killed by this tornado outbreak, I hope that the research that results from those data will help to redeem some of the tragedy. It may never be possible to reduce the tornado fatality rate to zero, but little by little, we unravel tornadoes’ secrets.
I am dead tired right now, but wanted to put forth a frame grab showing a funnel cloud that we witnessed near Allison, TX, a few miles west of Denton, at about 7:43 p.m. this evening.Funnel cloud about 2 mi. S of U.S. Hwy 380 near Allison, TX, at 7:43 p.m. CDT. Video frame grab (contrast enhanced).
Dan and I went chasing with a colleague, Aaron, and his girlfriend Meredith. Our initial target was Ardmore, because we were working within some schedule limitations. However, convection near Jacksboro, TX tempted us across the Red River, and after ditching a wrung-out LP storm near Forestburg, we skirted around the forward flank of a right-turning supercell approaching Lake Bridgeport from the west. After several minutes on gravel roads, we caught sight of a lowering in the cloud base from the lake shore just north of Wizard Wells, TX. We were forced to escape southeast through the town of Bridgeport, TX as the storm turned hard right.
The north Texas storms had all had only tenuous grasps on supercell characteristics, and became increasingly amorphous as time went on. After calling the chase off, we drove east along U.S. Hwy. 380 toward Denton, TX. Meredith noticed a lowering to our south, which began producing tapered scud fingers, two of which were clearly funnel-shaped, appeared in the same place with respect to surrounding cloud features, and lasted 20-30 seconds apiece. We reported this funnel cloud at 0046 UTC, just south of Allison, TX. A TVS appeared in the exact same location, accompanied by a minimal hook structure, in the subsequent 0047 UTC volume from KFWS, providing validation of our observation. As my husband noted, sometimes you’re done with a storm, but the storm isn’t done with you!
As we drove north along I-35, I happened to catch on video a CG bolt strike about 1/4 mile from our vehicle. It clearly beaded as it dissipated, and can be seen near the end of the attached YouTube clip.
Tornadoes produced from the same synoptic-scale system devastated Joplin, MO and portions of my old stomping grounds in Minneapolis, MN. My heart goes out to people impacted.
For those who aren’t familiar, Rocky Rascovich’s annual chaser picnic in Piedmont, OK is a local institution. It usually occurs on a Saturday in May, when skies are blue and there’s nothing to chase. Not only does it give the local (and vacationing) storm geeks a place to hang out, eat some burgers (prepared by his industrious wife Dee), ogle each other’s chase videos, and compare stories from the past year, but it gives the chase tour groups something to do on a down day.
I woke up honestly not expecting to chase today, and busied myself preparing a dish to pass at the picnic. I was dimly aware that there was an SPC-issued slight risk and 5% tornado contour out to our east, but figured it was going to be out in the SE OK jungle. (I was a little jaded from our clear-sky bust on Wednesday.) As I hobnobbed at the picnic with Rocky, Chris Novy, Bill Hark, et al., we checked the SPC mesoanalysis page periodically, but assumed that the big show would be out east on I-40 on the progged dryline bulge.
We left the picnic around 5:30 p.m. and headed back toward Norman. Even as we left Piedmont, we could see a crisp updraft tower to our distant south. As we approached Norman, it hit the tropopause and began to spread anvils both upshear and downshear. The radar presentation on Dan’s Radarscope looked more and more supercellular, so we decided to blow by home and keep heading south on I-35.
New cauliflower updrafts continued to swell up the storm’s rear flank, and by the time we reached the Sulphur exit and headed east on OK-7, a funnel cloud and tornado report had appeared on Spotter Network. All our gear was still in my trunk, so we didn’t get any video until we stopped on the east side of Sulphur around 7:30 p.m. Almost immediately, we were rewarded with a funnel cloud, followed by a couple of brief condensation funnels near Hickory, OK about 10 minutes later, all of which Dan reported on Spotter Network.
After that, we lost about 30 minutes enduring a “bungle in the jungle” after trying to cut east from OK-1 to U.S. Hwy. 377 along an intermediate county road. I danced my Corolla around in the mud and forayed down a dead-end road that our mapping software indicated was continuous. (We passed several other chasers who were also led astray.) We lost our data feed while navigating the back roads, but eventually regained it when we emerged near Fittstown, OK. By then, our target storm was trending downhill, while a second storm near Ada, OK (whose initial convective towers we had bypassed on our earlier drive south to get to the Sulphur/Hickory storm) had exploded into classic textbook supercell structure.
Tornadic supercell west of Ada, OK on 21 May 2010. Remnant of tornado (bowl-shaped lowering) can be seen just above the red SUV in the foreground.We rocketed up U.S. Hwy. 377 to Ada, OK – a town perched on a hill – and a saw a magnificent, underlit supercell crown the rise. Rounding the west side of Ada on OK-3, we heard spotters on ham radio reporting a tornado in progress, and managed catch a glimpse of it near a power sub-station. Additional funnels formed and dissipated on the west side of town, but the low contrast from a descending reflectivity core made it impossible to say with certainty if any made ground contact, even when my video was sped up.
Once it grew dark, the Ada supercell filled in completely with precipitation, and its radar presentation began to deteriorate. We called the chase off, and drove home to radio coverage of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s unenviable 93-87 loss to the Dallas Mavericks (despite their best efforts). At least we had an unexpected “win” today: Not only did we see several tornadoes, but so far as we know, there were no damage or injuries resulting.
Update: My husband posted his “director’s cut” of our chase here:
My planned blog post for this week was an anniversary retrospective about the Earth Day tornadoes I witnessed near Alanreed, Texas one year ago today. Those tornadoes were somewhat ambiguous in number (between three and seven, depending on who you asked), slow-moving, and accompanied by turquoise precipitation bombs. Little did I know that the scenario would unfold similarly a year later to the day.
I really wasn’t supposed to be chasing today, but brought the car and camcorder to work “just in case.” And even as the front zippered up all the way from Joplin, Missouri to Oklahoma City in about half an hour, I still waffled until the absolute last minute. The crisp convective towers outside my window tempted me outside to shoot some time lapse footage in the NWC parking lot. From there, of course, it was only a quick hop into my car and a straight shot east once one of the line segments transitioned into a supercell.
Our initial target was a supercell east of Seminole, OK, the site of our bust chase last week. However, as we left Norman around 5 p.m., we got stuck behind a large utility truck that couldn’t do more than 45 mph on gentle slopes, and I didn’t feel safe leapfrogging the 20-car convoy that accumulated behind it. Thankfully, they pulled over at a gas station, and we raced east to Seminole. By then, the supercell had moved off to Okemah, and we had become aware of additional supercells developing (including one over east Norman), so we decided to hold up in Seminole for a few minutes to re-evaluate.
We changed our target storm and intercepted it just east of Shawnee, OK. It produced a brief wall cloud, but its inflow was clearly being contaminated by precipitation from the Norman storm, and we soon lost sight of it in the rain and decided to let it go. We zigzagged back south and west through Shawnee, intercepting the Norman storm near Macomb, OK. It generated a wall cloud, and even a cascading, precipitation-filled clear slot on its back side, but no tornado. We watched it move away alongside a clutch of other chasers. Panorama showing a precipitation-filled clear slot behind the wall cloud in the Norman, OK storm.
We had to decide whether to continue pursuing the Norman storm as it moved off to the ENE, or drop south to another cell just east of Pauls Valley, OK. Fortunately, storm motions were reasonable (15-20 mph), giving us time to wait for one more radar update to inform our decision. The Norman storm had begun to congeal with its neighbor storms, so the clear choice was to drop south on U.S. Hwy. 177 toward Asher, which we did, coring the Pauls Valley storm as it moseyed east. We never saw any hail larger than dime size. At one point, we experienced a sudden wind shift from NWly to SEly, as a lowering passed by to our north, in the rain. (Later, we received a text message from a fellow chaser, concerned that he had seen us pass almost directly underneath a mesoanticyclone.)
We passed by RaXPol, on her maiden storm chase, parked near the intersection of U.S. Hwy. 177 and OK-59, just east of the town of Byars. We continued south for two more miles, and observed a dark, dense mesocyclone off to our west close to sunset. We stopped near Peach Crest Farm, and watched scud being rapidly ingested into the accompanying lowered cloud base. I knew our odds of seeing a tornado were increasing by the minute. As I drove another mile south, chasers parked along the highway suddenly started waving and pointing their cameras toward the west. We pulled over, and this is what we saw:
The time stamp on my video says 8:00 p.m. at the time of the first funnel, and I had just synchronized my camcorder to GPS time that afternoon, so I’m certain that it’s correct. The second pair of funnels occurred at 8:02 p.m.
Our location is marked by the blue crosshairs. Yikes!Our target storm began to dive southeast, toward Ada, OK. The mass of precipitation to our south continued to grow greener and more ominous, so we retreated back north. Along the way, my husband managed to pull a RadarScope update on his phone, and we were rather shocked to realize that we were looking down the maw of our storm’s inflow notch. Not a good place to be!
We encountered RaXPol, containing classmate/fellow chaser Jeff S., my former adviser, Howie Bluestein, and their ARRC engineer (John). They had collected data in an earlier wall cloud, but did not collect any data in the tornadoes. They decided to call it a night and headed west along OK-59, and we decided to follow. Along the way, we encountered some debris just east of Byars – some sheet metal peeled off a barn was blown from the north to the south side of the highway, gravel scattered across the road surface, and a power pole blown down nearby. As we gingerly tried to navigate the debris, some intellectual luminary two vehicles ahead of me got out, picked up the wet power line with his bare hands, moved it out of the road, then got back into his vehicle and drove away. All I can say is, thank goodness the line was dead! I could have witnessed a Darwin Award in the making. I’ve asked around, and I am apparently the only one who noticed that this happened, and unfortunately, I had turned off my dash cam just a few seconds before, so for all you know I could be making the whole thing up.
As we drove back toward Norman, we witnessed some spectacular lightning in the backsheared anvil. Many of the CGs we saw today (which were numerous – and close – hence our failure to exit the car in the video clip) had spectacular structure, appearing to loop back on themselves multiple times. There was also a terrific display of mammatus, but the sun had already gone down and we could only see the outlines of the “pouches” in the twilight. (Some friends in Norman managed to shoot very nice mammatus pictures – hopefully some of them will let me link!)
I’ve since seen video of a solid stovepipe tornado in the Byars storm, definitely a more substantial one than either of the two tornadoes that showed up in my video. I speculate that the brief funnels that Dan D. and I witnessed may have been vortex arches being drawn up into the Byars storm’s updraft, resulting in a counter-rotating pair of vortices (something I found – twice – in my Ph.D. research on the 4 May 2007 Greensburg tornado). Fascinating stuff!
500 mb forecast heights for 00 UTC on 15 April 2011I’ll reveal upfront that we didn’t catch any tornadoes on Thursday. The atmosphere decided to skunk us at every turn, failing to produce tornadoes in our target storms, then proceeding to spawn tornadoes minutes after we bailed for other targets.
The day started out with great anticipation. A negatively-tilted trough, along with other favorable ingredients, had appeared in model runs for several consecutive days. Originally, the prospective target was the eastern Oklahoma-Kansas border, around Bartlesville. We’d already arranged a three-car caravan to go chasing, including several new/guest chasers, thinking the odds were pretty good that we could bag them a first tornado.
About 24 hours before chase time, it became clear that the trough was digging farther south than originally thought, so we shifted our target south into eastern Oklahoma, where SPC had delineated a moderate risk area with extensive discussion about favorable conditions for supercells all along the dryline. Concerns about lack of low-level moisture return were allayed by mid-60s dewpoints spread across eastern Oklahoma (as seen by the Mesonet) on Thursday morning, and a strong signal appeared in both the NSSL WRF and HRRR models for isolated supercellular convection in eastern Oklahoma, south of I-40. In the meantime, the warm sector north of the Kansas border looked more and more like an uncapped mess, so we decided to eliminate it from our target.
Our caravan departed Norman just after lunchtime, stopping along I-40 north of Seminole as convective towers began to bubble all along the dryline. The “tail-end Charlie” storm near Atoka, OK, about 60 miles to our south, quickly became dominant. However, we were reluctant to blast south after it, because it would have meant committing to a storm that would certainly move into difficult, forested, hilly terrain, while further eliminating the northeast quadrant of Oklahoma from our target area, where other storms with wall cloud and funnel cloud reports were already occurring.
Dan's GR3 display at 4:38 p.m.We decided to wait for a cell that developed immediately to our southwest. For a while, it seemed like a good choice. This “middle” storm gradually gained strength and assumed supercell shape on radar. It had good separation from the storms to its south, which raised our hopes for uncontaminated inflow. However, I noticed that just about every blip on the KTLX radar had a supercell shape to it – an indication that the local atmosphere was almost uncapped, that convection was likely to fire up everywhere around us, and that outflow boundary and storm-storm interaction might prevent a single storm from becoming dominant. We decided to sit tight, preach patience, and wait for our nearest cluster of storms to get its act together.
Brief wall cloud north of Okemah, OK at 6:17 p.m.When one storm in our cluster finally did become dominant, we proceeded to chase it north of Seminole, then abandoned it as it gusted out and another cell to its southwest began to grow. Of course, just a few minutes after we departed our original target storm, GR3 flashed a tornado report from a credible chaser underneath it. D’oh! We watched our second target storm produce and dissipate a couple of wall clouds, then decided to race east on I-40 after our original target storm, now located over Okemah, OK. We easily caught up with it again, and watched for a few minutes as it, too, generated and dissipated a wall cloud with a clear slot, but refused to complete the display and produce a tornado.
As we zigzagged north and east through Morris, OK, nickel-sized hail pelted our caravan. It didn’t make us feel much better that the Atoka storm, well out of our reach to the south, was leaving a trail of tornado reports in its wake. As we passed the wind profiler station near Haskell, OK, its measured wind profiles indicated a weakness in the hodograph between 1 and 3 km above the surface – a possible clue as to why these storms seemed almost incapable of generating persistent low-level rotation. We eventually called off the chase after dark, just north of the town of Wagoner, east of Tulsa. We were treated to some spectacular ground-to-cloud lightning, a consolation prize of sorts, on the drive home.
Tornadoes to the north, tornadoes to the south. Guess where we were?Yesterday stung more than I expected it to. It was a day that reminds me how much I still have to learn about storms. A group of experienced chasers made near-unanimous decisions that probably would have paid off in most situations. In the end, our decision to avoid the difficult terrain east of Ardmore probably cost us a glimpse of the Tushka tornado, but at the same time, I know of some people who did commit to that storm and still didn’t see a thing, thanks to trees (both standing and fallen), and the notorious terrain that compelled VORTEX2’s organizers to cut a chunk of SE OK out of their operating domain. But, no guts, no glory.
For those who are curious what we missed, I’ll link to this video shot by our friend Gabe G. and his chase partners.
Unfortunately, this tornado caused two fatalities, numerous injuries, and extensive damage in Tushka, OK. In light of that, our bust chase seems pretty trivial.
To their credit, our guest chasers were all very good sports about the situation. A couple of them can’t wait for another chance to chase, and it looks like there are, indeed, other opportunities peeking over the horizon.
I started out my Saturday at a meeting of the local Norman ham radio club (W5NOR), where I was invited to give a talk about my Ph.D. research on the 2007 Greensburg storm and tornado. By the end of the day, I’d be watching yet another supercell track near Greensburg.
Dan D. and I briefly considered making the long drive up to Iowa, where were convinced a significant severe weather outbreak was going to occur. However, we were reluctant to shoulder the fuel expense (gas is now approaching $3.75/gallon, even in central Oklahoma) and the long drives there and back, so we looked to more local targets.
I was not terribly impressed with any of the high-res WRF and HRRR solutions for 9 April over Oklahoma and Kansas, which consistently showed brief, disorganized bursts of convection, primarily at and after sunset. However, we joined a three-car caravan (including former officemates Jeff S. and Jana H.) and headed up toward Wichita. We spotted some wind damage near Blackwell, OK, caused by outflow from a supercell that crossed I-35 near sunset the day before.
Discouraged by the clear blue skies surrounding us, we held up briefly just north of Wichita, KS, then again in Kingman, KS. As 00Z approached, I was not optimistic. We had a number of “guest” chasers in our caravan, so we decided to target an anemic-looking blip that appeared near Woodward, OK. Haze prevented a good view of the associated cumulus towers until the sun dipped down behind it. I was encouraged that the updraft was substantial enough to completely block the sun, and the reflectivity values in the core continued to increase with time.
As we approached the storm along U.S. Hwy. 50/400 (which is vastly improved after years of construction, by the way), it took on a more supercellular appearance on KDDC. Interestingly, the storm’s motion was that of a left-mover (racing northeast at 55 mph), and a notch and mesoanticyclone developed on the storm’s northern flank. As the sun finally set at 8:04 p.m. CDT, we also saw hints of a hook and mesocyclone on the storm’s southern flank. The storm had a split personality!
North of Pratt, we passed an area of wildfire damage, with some stumps and trees still smoldering orange in the twilight. (Didn’t get any pictures of this, unfortunately.) The storm continued to race away to the northeast. Its base appeared to be well over 1 km AGL, a result of the 25-to-30 degree F temperature-dewpoint spreads being analyzed in the area. We stopped to watch the storm move away into the gathering darkness, then called the chase off. As we headed back to Pratt to get food, we managed to raise Amos M., who was chasing a few miles away from us, on amateur radio, and convinced him to join us for dinner at Playa Azul. We hadn’t seen him since the previous chase season, and it was good to catch up. Afterward, he joined our caravan as we headed back down I-35. We made it back to Norman around 2 a.m.
Along the way, reports surged in of the tornado outbreak in Iowa, including extensive damage in Mapleton. Even though I didn’t see a tornado on a day when so many others did, I don’t feel any great regret over our choice of target. We saw a photogenic supercell that exhibited interesting behavior, and didn’t have to stray that far from home to do it.
My chase partners on this day were Dan Dawson and Jana Houser. We were attracted to the area around Enid, Oklahoma as an initial target, because of the strong shear, a narrow corridor of CAPE, and an incipient dryline push indicated in the models (SPC outlook). We intercepted a strengthening cell near Pond Creek, Oklahoma around 5:20 p.m. The reflectivity from KICT (KVNX was down for its polarimetric upgrade) showed a persistent, 60+ dBZ core, so we assume there was hail present.
Storm motions were ENE at 45-55 mph. As we jogged east and then north from Lamont, the cloud base began to lower. The first one quickly bowed out and became a “whale’s mouth”, indicating that a cold downdraft had reached the surface and begun to spread out toward us. Gradually, however, as we passed through Blackwell on OK-11, the storm, now clearly a supercell on radar, began to recover and developed a clear slot on its west side. We continued east in order to keep pace with the storm.
Near Kidare, the paved road T-ed off, and we had to make a choice whether to go north a few miles to Newkirk to keep the base within visual range, or south three miles to continue east on OK-11 through Kaw City. I was driving, so that choice was primarily the responsibility of my chase partners. While most other chasers turned north at the intersection of OK-11 and U.S. Hwy. 77, we turned south, and then continued east across the Kaw Lake Dam. Our view toward the base of the storm now blocked, we began to hear tornado warnings for the storm coming from three different CWAs (Tulsa, Norman, and Wichita) and questioned whether we had made the right decision.
However, as we emerged from the depression around Kaw Lake, we started to see suspicious appendages under the cloud base. It being February, it was close to sunset (around 6:20 p.m.), so the contrast wasn’t great. We turned north on OK-18 at Shidler, Oklahoma; the video sequence above records what we saw after emerging from the north side of that town. One particular appendage caught and held our attention. From a distance, it could have been mistaken for a scud finger, but as we drew closer, its persistence and tapered, conical shape made clear that it was a funnel cloud. In the video, you can hear us debating for a minute or two whether what we’re seeing is a tornado, or not. The funnel never made contact with the ground, but I did note a few puffs of red dirt underneath it.
After the white cone became occluded and dissipated, my chase partners noted a continuation of the tornado in the form of a dust tube extending from the ground to cloud base off to our east. I was still driving and unable to film this phenomenon; however my chase partners documented it.
We continued north on OK-18 until we crossed the Kansas border. At no point did we note crossing a surface damage track; however, it was dark, so we might have missed seeing some damage. As of this writing, I am not aware of a damage survey for this tornado; however, the SPC preliminary report notes an EF-0 rating.
We turned east on U.S. Hwy 166, following the storm as it produced an additional lowering illuminated by lightning. However, this lowering dissipated after a few minutes. We called off the chase near Sedan, Kansas, on account of darkness.
