A promising dryline setup turns out to be an LP dud in far western Oklahoma. An extremely compact shortwave slowly dug into the southern Great Plains with a modest moisture fetch from the Gulf of Mexico in advance of a sharp dryline situated at the state line between Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.
An enhanced risk was in place across from the Rio Grande up through far western Oklahoma and into northwest Kansas near Great Bend. While tornado chances appeared low, the possibility for scultped supercells was too good to pass up. We initially set a target of Mangum.
After departing down 40 west, we decided to adjust and stuck north of Mangum near Willow and watched the first attempts at convective initiation going up along the dryline near Erick. We slowly moved north as the towers began to anvil out.
Unfortunately, the moisture in the immediate vicinity of the dryline had begun to crater and LCLs began to skyrocket. We had two distinct updrafts with bases well above 1500m by the time we got our first view south of Sayre.
The strong ventilating winds at the anvil level coupled with the persistent moisture depth issues made the storms LP from the getgo. Almost no precip fell at any point at our vantage point even as we moved just to the north of the updraft. Eventually, both bases began to shrivel up and die leaving a substantial orphan anvil in it's wake.
Shortly thereafter, we decided to move back east on Oklahoma 152 to meet a cluster of storms coming out of the Wichitas. Unfortunately, the storms were extraordinarily outflow dominant and presented a meager shelf cloud with cold air streaming out east of Cordell.
Shortly thereafter, we decided to call the chase and began traipsing back east with the storms hot on our heels as we negotiated OK-152 to OK-37 back towards Norman.
Chase Stats
Miles Driven: 299
Cost: $15
Tornadoes: 0
Largest Hail: none
Highest Winds: 30 mph (estimated)
No comments:
Post a Comment