2015 Off to a Great Start

The 2015 chase season kicked off with a bang for most people yesterday, with strong supercells forming ahead of a lead impulse and the main trough/cold front in the late afternoon. Oklahoma and Arkansas both saw two tornadoes a piece. Sadly the Sand Springs tornado NW of Tulsa caused multiple injuries in a trailer park while also killing one person. Moore, the city that can't seem to catch a break, also got hit by a weak tornado that formed after the attendant supercell modified the front/OFB it was riding and seemed to have a very QLCS-esque circulation without an attendant large low-level mesocyclone. Yesterday was just plain strange from a meteorological perspective. 

As for my chase day, Noah Myers and myself left Norman around 3 PM CDT with an initial target of Minco. We cut down 9 through Blanchard, over to Chickasha but stopped short of Minco near Pocasset to watch as the beginning stages of convective initiation became visible to our NW. The front was visible on KTLX as a small band NW of El Reno and it initially looked like the storms might be instantly linear, but as we started moving west towards Gracemont it became apparent that the storms were actually semi-discrete. We got an excellent view of the storm as we closed in and managed to make it to a nice turn off on the west side of 281 north of Gracemont/Anadarko. The storm had decent mid-level rotation and ended up having a stacked plates appearance with laminar bands towards the top of the updraft tower. More linear storms with a rather ominous gust front were staying off to the north as the storm slowly pushed SE, staying out ahead with a nice rounded shape for the majority of our time on that road. After watching some decent attempts at organizing low-level rotation, the storm began to push too close, forcing us to drop south a bit to just north of Anadarko near the Delaware Nation headquarters. We watched dramatic outflow motion along the storm's still-sculpted gust front as well as a couple gustnadoes before continuing south onto HWY 9 back towards Chickasha. We got some pretty strong outflow winds on our way back and watched the storm's last attempt at a wall cloud get undercut by stable air before letting it pass over us in Chickasha. Finished off a nice day at the Dairy Queen, running into Ariel Cohen there, before heading back to Norman with a great lightning show to our SE. 

 

So far 2015 has started out great. While there were missed tornadoes yesterday, there was no way in hell I was going to chase back into the metro and the Tulsa storms had sailed NE before we even left Norman making the Anadarko storm an excellent prize in a decent roads network. A good looking supercell on the prairie is always a welcome event this early in the season. As of right now, the only thing showing up on the models of interest is a longwave moving into the central CONUS towards the end of next week. Details such as moisture and timing are still extraordinarily fuzzy, although this morning's 12Z GFS was very unkind towards the possibility of a solid fetch from the GOM. I'll likely have updates throughout next week on the status of another possible S Plains event late next week. Also be on the look out for my chase logs for March 19th and March 25th at the start of April. Enjoy your weekend, ladies and gents.